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BOOKS BY GEORGE W. CABLE 

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN 






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"That gardening Is best . . . which best ministers to inan' 
least disturbance of nature's freedom. 



fclicitv with 



n.o trc- in Ih.- n.i.l.ile ..f tlu- picture is Barrie's .-Im. ^';l;y; ,|;[|^^^;' 1^ 
r and the tree was sniallor. 1 he dark tree 



This is my stiK . 

between mv thuinl> and fin^'er, Imt 1 was v 



the foregronMii dm the rii; 



ht is IVlix Adler's hemlock. 



[Page 841 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 



BY 
GEORGE W. CABLE 



ILLUSTRATED 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK :: :: :: MCMXIV 






Copyright. 1914, by 
CHARLES SCRIBXER'S SOXS 

Published October, 1914 




OCT -6 1914 



^Arr> 



©CI.A.'n9878 



•*3 
O 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

MY OWN ACRE 1 

THE AMERICAN GARDEN 41 

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 79 

THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON . . 107 

THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE . . . 129 

THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW ORLEANS . 163 



ILLUSTRATION S 



"That gardening is best . . . which best ministers to man's felicity 

with least disturbance of nature's freedom" .... Frontispiece 

Facing Page 

"... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill 

River loiters through Paradise" 6 

"On this green of the dryads . . . lies My Own Acre" 8 

" The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full 

back to the rapids just above My Own Acre " 12 

" A fountain . . . w^here one,— or two, — can sit and hear it w^hisper " 22 

"The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of 
the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My 
Own Acre" 24 

" Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn 

by visiting friends" 26 

" How the words were said which some of the planters spoke " . 28 

" ' Where are you going ? ' says the eye. * Come and see,' says the 

roaming line " 34 

" The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays 

on the side nearest the law^n" 36 

"... until the house itself seems as naturally ... to grow up out 
of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a lady's 
song" 48 

vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing Page 
"Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds" 52 

"Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom" .... 52 

Fences masked by shrubbery 64 

After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive .... 72 

Shrubbery versus annuals 72 

Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South 

Hall, Williston Seminary 74 

"... a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful 

undulations" 74 

" However enraptured of w^ild nature you may be, you do and must 

require of her some subserviency about your own dwelling" 84 

"Plant it where it will. best enjoy itself " 86 

"... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and 
breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far 
end" 94 

"Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure" 96 

". . . tall, rectangular, three-story piles . . . full of windows all of 

one size, pigeon-house style" 100 

"You can make gardening a concerted public movement" . . . 112 

"Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines 

of all its buildings" 122 

" Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure 

its widest and most general dissemination" 122 

"Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual 

wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus " 138 

viii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing Page 
" One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that stran- 
gers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy 
a nearer view" 1^^ 

" Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domi- 
cile" 148 

"Those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them" ... 148 

"In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its 

doors— so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines" . . 174 

" The lawn . . . lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub- 

and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across "... 174 

" There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward. ... In a half- 
day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dig- 
nity by the elimination of these excesses" 176 

"The rear walk . . . follows the dwelling's ground contour with 

business precision— being a business path" 178 

"Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even . . . where it does not 

conceal, the house's architectural faults " 180 

"... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's unreality " 182 

" Back of the building-line the fences . . . generally more than head- 
high . . . are sure to be draped" 184 

"... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of 

Easter" 184 

" The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration . . . keep- 
ing a winter's share of its feminine grace and softness "... 186 



' It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid 



as a spruce 



192 



IX 



MY OWN ACRE 



MY OWN ACRE 

A LIFELONG habit of story-telling has much 
-^ ^ to do with the production of these pages. 

All the more does it move me because it has 
always included, as perhaps it does in most 
story-tellers, a keen preference for true stories, 
stories of actual occurrence. 

A flower-garden trying to be beautiful is a 
charming instance of something which a story- 
teller can otherwise only dream of. For such a 
garden is itself a story, one which actually and 
naturally occurs, yet occurs under its master's 
guidance and control and with artistic effect. 

Yet it was this same story-telling bent which 
long held me back while from time to time I gen- 
eralized on gardening and on gardens other 
than my own. A well-designed garden is not 
only a true story happening artistically but it 
is one that passes through a new revision each 
year, "with the former translations diligently 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

compared and revised." Each year my own 
acre has confessed itself so full of mistransla- 
tions of the true text of gardening, has promised, 
each season, so much fairer a show in its next 
edition, and has been kept so prolongedly busy 
teaching and reteaching its master where to 
plant what, while as to money outlays compelled 
to live so much more like a poet than like a 
prince, that the bent for story-telling itseK could 
not help but say wait. 

Now, however, the company to which this 
chapter logically belongs is actually showing ex- 
cellent reasons why a history of their writer's 
own acre should lead them. Let me, then, 
begin by explaining that the small city of North- 
ampton, Massachusetts, where I have lived all 
the latter three-fifths of my adult years, sits on 
the first rise of ground which from the west over- 
looks the alluvial meadows of the Connecticut, 
nine miles above South Hadley Falls. Close at 
its back a small stream, Mill River, coming out 
of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Con- 
necticut, winds through a strip of woods so fair 
as to have been named — from a much earlier 

4 



MY OWN ACRE 

day than when Jenny Lind called it so — "Para- 
dise." On its town side this wooded ground a 
few hundred yards wide drops suddenly a hun- 
dred feet or so to the mill stream and is cut into 
many transverse ravines. 

In its timber growth, conspicuous by their 
number, tower white-pines, while among them 
stand only less loftily a remarkable variety of 
forest trees imperfectly listed by a certain hum- 
ble authority as "mostly h-oak, h-ellum, and 
h-ash, with a little 'ickory." 

Imperfectly listed, for there one may find also 
the birch and the beech, the linden, sycamore, 
chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, and 
maple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths 
as the hornbeam and hop-hornbeam, willows, 
black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and 
other cornels, several viburnums, bush maples 
of two or three kinds, alder, elder, sumach, 
hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other per- 
ennial, fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites, 
beneath which lies a leaf -mould rife with ferns 
and wild flowers. 

From its business quarter the town's chief 

5 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

street of residence, Elm Street, begins a gently 
winding westerly ascent to become an open high- 
road from one to another of the several farming 
and manufacturing villages that use the water- 
power of Mill River. But while it is still a street 
there runs from it southerly at a right angle a 
straight bit of avenue some three hundred yards 
long — an exceptional length of unbent street for 
Northampton. This short avenue ends at an- 
other, still shorter, lying square across its foot 
within some seventy yards of that suddenly fall- 
ing wooded and broken ground where Mill River 
loiters through Paradise. The strip of land 
between the woods and this last street is taken 
up by half a dozen dwellings of modest dignity, 
whose front shade-trees, being on the southerly 
side, have been placed not on the sidewalk's 
roadside edge but on the side next the dwelhngs 
and close within their line of private ownership: 
red, white and post-oaks set there by the pres- 
ent writer when he named the street "Dryads' 
Green." They are now twenty-one years old 
and give a good shade which actually falls where 
it is wanted — upon the sidewalk. 

6 




"... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River 
loiters through Paradise." 

A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides the grove from the old river road. 



MY OWN ACRE 

On this green of the dryads, where it inter- 
cepts the ''avenue" that shps over from the 
Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my 
own acre; house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the 
rear, in the edge of the pines, the study. Back 
there by the study — which sometimes in irony 
we call the power-house — the lawn merges into 
my seven other acres, in Paradise. Really the 
whole possession is a much humbler one than I 
find myself able to make it appear in the flatter- 
ing terms of land measure. Those seven acres 
of Paradise I acquired as "waste land." Never- 
theless, if I were selling that "waste," that 
"hole in the ground," it would not hurt my 
conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds 
on it alone are worth more than it cost: wood- 
thrushes and robins, golden orioles, scarlet tana- 
gers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar- 
birds, veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, 
kinglets, the flicker, the cuckoo, the nuthatch, 
the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, 
not to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, 
the little green heron or that cock of the walk, 
the red squirrel. 

7 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

Speaking of walks, it was with them — and 
one drive — in this grove, that I made my first 
venture toward the artistic enhancement of my 
acre, — acre this time in the old sense that 
ignores feet and rods. I was quite willing to 
make it a matter of as many years as necessary 
when pursued as play, not work, on the least 
possible money outlay and having for its end 
a garden of joy, not of care. By no inborn sa- 
gacity did I discover this to be the true first 
step, but by the trained eye of an honored and 
dear friend, that distinguished engineer and fa- 
mous street commissioner of New York, Colonel 
George E. Waring, who lost his life in the sani- 
tary regeneration of Havana. 

"Contour paths" was the word he gave me; 
paths starting from the top of the steep broken 
ground and bending in and out across and 
around its ridges and ravines at a uniform de- 
cline of, say, six inches to every ten feet, until 
the desired terminus is reached below; much as, 
in its larger way, a railway or aqueduct might, 
or as cattle do when they roam in the hills. 
Thus, by the slightest possible interference with 

8 




o > 









MY OWN ACRE 

natural conditions, these paths were given a 
winding course every step of which was pleas- 
ing because justified by the necessities of the 
case, traversing the main inequalities of the 
ground with the ease of level land yet without 
diminishing its superior variety and charm. 
And so with contour paths I began to find, right 
at my back door and on my own acre, in nerve- 
tired hours, an outdoor relaxation which I could 
begin, leave ofiP and resume at any moment and 
which has never staled on me. For this was 
the genesis of all I have learned or done in 
gardening, such as it is. 

My appliances for laying out the grades were 
simple enough: a spirit-level, a stiff ten-foot rod 
with an eighteen-inch leg nailed firmly on one 
end of it, a twelve-inch leg on the other, a 
hatchet, and a basket of short stakes with which 
to mark the points, ten feet apart, where the 
longer leg, in front on all down grades, rested 
when the spirit-level, strapped on the rod, 
showed the rod to be exactly horizontal. Trivial 
inequalities of surface were arbitrarily cut down 
or built up and covered with leaves and pine- 

9 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

straw to disguise the fact, and whenever a tyee 
or anything worth preserving stood in the way 
here came the loaded barrow and the barrow- 
ist, hke a piece of artillery sweeping into action, 
and a fill undistinguishable from nature soon 
brought the path around the obstacle on what 
had been its lower side, to meander on at its 
unvarying rate of rise or fall as though nothing 
— except the trees and wild flowers — had hap- 
pened since the vast freshets of the post-glacial 
period built the landscape. I made the drive 
first, of steeper grade than the paths; but every 
new length of way built, whether walk or road, 
made the next easier to build, by making easier 
going for the artillery, the construction train. 
Also each new path has made it easier to bring 
up, for the lawn garden, sand, clay, or leaf -mould, 
or for hearth consumption all the wood which 
the grove's natural mortality each year requires 
to be disposed of. There is a superior spiritual 
quality in the warmth of a fire of h-oak, h-ash, 
and even h-ellum gathered from your own acre, 
especially if the acre is very small and has con- 
tour paths. By a fire of my own acre's "dead 

10 



MY OWN ACRE 

ai^id down" I write these lines. I never buy 
cordwood. 

Only half the grove has required these paths, 
the other half being down on the flat margin 
of the river, traversed by a cart-road at least 
half a century old, though used by wheels hardly 
twice a year; but in the three acres where lie 
the contour paths there is now three-fifths of a 
mile of them, not a rod of which is superfluous. 
And then I have two examples of another kind 
of path: paths with steps; paths which for good 
and lawful reasons cannot allow you time to go 
around on the "five per cent" grade but must 
cut across, taking a single ravine lengthwise, to 
visit its three fish-pools. 

These steps, and two short retaining walls 
elsewhere in the grove, are made of the field 
stones of the region, uncut. All are laid "dry" 
like the ordinary stone fences of New England 
farms, and the walls are built with a smart 
inward batter so that the winter frosts may 
heave them year after year, heave and leave 
but not tumble them down. I got that idea 
from a book. Everything worth while on my 

11 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

acre is from books except what two or three pro- 
fessional friends have from time to time dropped 
into my hungry ear. Both my ears have good 
appetites — for garden lore. 

About half a mile from me, down Mill River, 
stands the factory of a prized friend who more 
than any other man helps by personal daily care 
to promote Northampton's "People's Institute," 
of whose home-garden work I have much to 
say in the chapters that follow this one. For 
forty years or more this factory has been known 
far and wide as the "Hoe Shop" because it 
makes shovels. It has never made hoes. It 
uses water-power, and the beautiful mill-pond 
behind its high dam keeps the river full back to 
the rapids just above my own acre. In winter 
this is the favorite skating-pond of the town 
and of Smith College. In the greener seasons 
of college terms the girls constantly pass up- 
stream and down in their pretty rowboats and 
canoes, making a charming effect as seen from 
my lawn's rear edge at the head of the pine 
and oak shaded ravine whose fish-pools are gay 
by turns with elder, wild sunflower, sumach, 
iris, water-lilies, and forget-me-not. 

12 




"The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to 
the rapids just above My Own Acre." 

This is the "Hoe Shop." The tower was ruined by fire many years ago, and because of its 
unsafety is being taken down at the present writing. 



MY OWN ACRE 

This ravine, the middle one of the grove's 
three, is about a hundred feet wide. When I 
first began to venture the human touch in it, it 
afforded no open spot level enough to hold a 
camp-stool. From the lawn above to the river 
road below, the distance is three hundred and 
thirty feet, and the fall, of fifty-five feet, is 
mostly at the upper end, which is therefore too 
steep, as well as too full of varied undergrowth, 
for any going but climbing. In the next ravine 
on its left there was a clear, cold spring and in 
the one on its right ran a natural rivulet that 
trickled even in August; but this middle ravine 
was dry or merely moist. 

Here let me say to any who would try an ama- 
teur landscape art on their own acre at the edge 
of a growing town, that the town's growth tends 
steadily to diminish the amount of their land- 
scape's natural water supply by catching on 
street pavements and scores and hundreds of 
roofs, lawns and walks, and carrying away in 
sewers, the rain and melting snows which for 
ages filtered slowly through the soil. Small 
wonder, I think, that, when in the square 
quarter-mile between my acre and Elm Street 

13 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took 
the place of an old farm, my grove, by sheer 
water famine, lost several of its giant pines. 
Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length 
to have ceased. 

But about that ravine: one day the nature of 
its growth and soil, especially its alders, elders, 
and willows and a show of clay and gravel, 
forced on my notice the likelihood that here, 
too, had once been a spring, if no more. I 
scratched at its head with a stick and out came 
an imprisoned rill like a recollected word from 
the scratched head of a schoolboy. Happily the 
spot was just at the bottom of the impassably 
steep fall of ground next the edge of the lawn 
and was almost in the centre of those four 
acres — one of sward, three of woods — which I 
proposed to hold under more or less discipline, 
leaving the rest — a wooded strip running up the 
river shore — wholly wild, as college girls, for 
example, would count wildness. In both parts 
the wealth of foliage on timber and underbrush 
almost everywhere shut the river out of view 
from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a 

14 



MY OWN ACRE 

glint, if no more, of water. And so there I 
thought at once to give myself what I had all 
my life most absurdly wished for, a fish-pool. 
I had never been able to look upon an aquarium 
and keep the tenth Commandment. I had never 
caught a fish without wanting to take it home 
and legally adopt it into the family — a tendency 
which once led my son to say, ''Yes, he would 
be pleased to go fishing with me if I would only 
fish in a sportsmanlike manner." What a beau- 
tifully marked fish is the sun-perch ! Once, 
in boyhood, I kept six of those "pumpkin- 
seed" in a cistern, and my smile has never been 
the same since I lost them — one of my war 
losses. 

I resolved to impound the waters of my spring 
in the ravine and keep fish at last — without 
salt — to my heart's content. Yet I remem- 
bered certain restraining precepts: first, that 
law of art which condemns incongruity — re- 
quires everything to be in keeping with its nat- 
ural surroundings — and which therefore, for one 
thing, makes an American garden the best pos- 
sible sort of garden to have in America; second, 

15 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

that twin art law, against inutility, which de- 
mands that everything in an artistic scheme 
serve the use it pretends to serve; third, a pre- 
cept of Colonel Waring's: ''Don't fool with run- 
ning water if you haven't money to fool away"; 
and, fourth, that best of all gardening rules — 
look before you leap. 

However, on second thought, and tenth, and 
twentieth, one thought a day for twenty days, I 
found that if water was to be impounded any- 
where on my acre here was the strategic point. 
Down this ravine, as I have said, was the lawn's 
one good glimpse of the river, and a kindred 
gleam intervening would tend, in effect, to draw 
those farther waters in under the trees and into 
the picture. 

Such relationships are very rewarding to find 
to whoever would garden well. Hence this men- 
tion. One's garden has to do with whatever is 
in sight from it, fair or otherwise, and it is as 
feasible and important to plant in the fair as to 
plant out the otherwise. Also, in making my 
grove paths, I had noticed that to cross this ra- 
vine where at one or two places in its upper half 

16 



MY OWN ACRE 

a contour grade would have been pettily cir- 
cuitous and uninteresting, and to cross it com- 
fortably, there should be either a bridge or a 
dam; and a dam with water behind it seemed 
pleasanter every way — showed less incongruity 
and less inutility — than a bridge with no water 
under it. 

As to "'fooling with running water," the mere 
trickle here in question had to be dragged out 
of its cradle to make it run at all. It remained 
for me to find out by experience that even that 
weakling, imprisoned and grown to a pool, 
though of only three hundred square feet in sur- 
face, when aided and abetted by New England 
frosts and exposed on a southern slope to winter 
noonday suns, could give its amateur captor as 
much trouble — proportionately — as any He- 
brew babe drawn from the bulrushes of the Nile 
is said to have given his. 

Now if there is any value in recording these 
experiences it can be only in the art principles 
they reveal. To me in the present small instance 
the principle illustrated was that of the true 
profile line for ascent or descent in a garden. 

17 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

You may go into any American town where 
there is any inequahty of ground and in half 
an hour find a hundred or two private lawns 
graded — from the house to each boundary line 
— on a single falling curve, or, in plain English, 
a hump. The best reason why this curve is not 
artistic, not pleasing, but stupid, is that it is not 
natural and gains nothing by being unnatural. 
All gardening is a certain conquest of Nature, 
and even when ''formal" should interfere with 
her own manner and custom as slightly as is 
required by the necessities of the case — the 
needs of that particular spot's human use and 
joy. The right profile and surface for a lawn of 
falling grade, the surface which will permanently 
best beguile both eye and foot, should follow a 
double curve, an ogee line. For, more or less 
emphasized, that is Nature's line in all her 
affable moods on land or water: a descent or as- 
cent beginning gradually, increasing rapidly, and 
concluding gently. We see it in the face of any 
smooth knoll or billow. I believe the artists 
impute to Praxiteles a certain ownership in this 
double curve. It is a living line; it suggests 

18 



MY OWN ACRE 

Nature conscious and astir as no single curve 
or straight line can. 

I admit that even among amateurs this is 
rather small talk, but it brings me to this point: 
in the passage of water down a ravine of its own 
making, this line of Nature astir may repeat 
itself again and again but is commonly too in- 
affable, abrupt, angular, to suggest the ogee. 
In that middle part of it where the descent is 
swift it may be more or less of a plunge, and 
after the plunge the water is hkely to pause on 
the third turn, in a natural pool, before resuming 
its triple action again. And so, in my ravine, 
some seasons later, I ventured to detain the over- 
flow of my first pool on a second and a third 
lingering place, augmenting the water supply by 
new springs developed in the bottoms of the 
new pools. The second pool has a surface of a 
thousand square feet, the third spans nineteen 
hundred, and there are fish in all three, hatched 
there — "pumpkin-seed" included, but also trout 
— among spontaneous bulrushes, pond-lilies, 
flags, and dainty water-weeds; and sometimes at 
night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock 

19 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

full moon shines up from it to the stone exedra 
on the lawn, I seem to have taken my Praxitelean 
curves so directly from Nature that she thinks 
she took them herseK from me and thanks me 
for the suggestion. 

Please observe that of great gardens, or of 
costly gardens whether great or only costly, we 
here say nothing. Our theme is such a garden 
as a householder may himself make and keep 
or for which, at most, he needs professional 
advice only in its first planning, and for its 
upkeep one gardener, with one occasional helper 
in pressing seasons or in constructional work. 

Constructional work. Dams, for example. In 
two of my dams I built cores of concrete and 
thus made acquaintance with that interesting 
material. Later I pressed the acquaintanceship, 
made garden and grove seats, a table or two, a 
very modest fountain for a single jet of water in 
my highest, smallest fish-pool, and even a flight 
of steps with a pair of gaine-shaped pedestals — 
suggested by a sculptor friend — at their top. 
The exedra I mentioned just now is of concrete. 
The stuff is a temptation to be wary of. The 

20 



MY OWN ACRE 

ordinary gray sort — I have touched no other 

— is a humble medium, and pretentious designs 
in humble materials are one of the worst, and 
oldest, of garden incongruities. In my ventures 
with concrete I have studied for grace in form 
but grace subordinated to stability, and have 
shunned embellishment. Embellishment for its 
own sake is the easiest and commonest sin 
against good art wherever art becomes self-con- 
scious. It is having a riotous time just now in 
concrete. I have rarely seen a commercial con- 
crete garden-seat which was not more ornate 
than I should want it for my own acre. I hap- 
pen to have two or three articles in my garden 
which are a trifle elaborate but they are of 
terra-cotta, are not home-made and would be 
plainer could I have found them so. 

A garden needs furniture only less than a 
house, and concrete is a boon to ''natural" gar- 
dening, being inexpensive, rustic, and imperish- 
able. I fancy a chief reason why there is such 
inconsiderate dearth of seats and steps in our 
American amateur gardens is the old fashion 

— so well got rid of at any cost — of rustic 

21 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

cedar and hickory stairs and benches. ''Have 
none of them," was Colonel Waring's injunc- 
tion; ''they are forever out of repair." 

But I fear another reason is that so often our 
gardens are neither for private ease nor social 
joy, but for public display and are planned 
mainly for street exhibition. That is the way 
we commonly treat garden fountains ! We 
make a smug show of unfenced, unhedged, uni- 
versal hospitality across a sidewalk boundary 
which nevertheless we hold inviolate — some- 
times by means of a painted sign or gas-pipe — 
and never say "Have a seat" to the dearest 
friend in any secluded nook of our shrubberies, 
if there is such a nook. How many of us know 
a fountain beside an embowered seat where one, 
— or two, — with or without the book of verses, 
can sit and hear it whisper or watch the moon- 
light cover it with silent kisses ? In my limited 
experience I have known of but two. One is 
by the once favorite thought-promoting sum- 
mer seat of Augustus Saint-Gaudens on his own 
home acre in Vermont; the other I need not 
particularize further than to say that it is one 

22 




A fountain . . . where one, — or two, — can sit and hear it whisper." 



Tbe ravine of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet between the upper and 

lowermost pool. 



MY OWN ACRE 

of the things which interlock and unify a certain 
garden and grove. 

The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and 
the pushing of the lawn in under the grove was 
one of the early tasks of my own acre. When 
the house was built its lot and others backed up 
to a hard, straight rear line where the old field 
had halted at its fence and where the woods 
began on ground that fell to the river at an angle 
of from forty to fifty degrees. Here my gifted 
friend and adviser gave me a precept got from 
his earlier gifted friend and adviser, Frederick 
Law Olmsted: that passing from any part of a 
pleasure-ground to any part next it should be 
entirely safe and easy or else impossible. By 
the application of this maxim I brought my lawn 
and grove together in one of the happiest of mar- 
riages. For I proceeded, by filling with earth 
(and furnace ashes), to carry the lawn in, prac- 
tically level, beyond the old fence fine and un- 
der the chestnuts and pines sometimes six feet, 
sometimes twelve, until the difficult and unsafe 
forty or fifty degrees of abrupt fall were changed 
to an impassable sixty and seventy degrees, and 

23 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

every one's instinctive choice of way was the 
contour paths. 

At the same time this has preserved, and even 
enhanced, the place's wildness, especially the 
wild flowers and the low-nesting birds. Some-' 
times a few yards of retaining-wall, never ce- 
mented, always laid up dry and with a strong 
inward batter, had to be put in to avoid smoth- 
ering the roots of some great tree; for, as every- 
body knows and nearly everybody forgets, roots, 
like fishes, must have air. In one place, across 
the filled head of a ravine, the wall, though 
but a scant yard high, is fifty feet long, and 
there is another place where there should be one 
like it. In this work no tree was sacrificed save 
one noble oak done to death by a youth who 
knew but forgot that roots must have air. 

Not to make the work expensive it was pur- 
sued slowly, through many successive seasons; 
yet before even its easy, first half was done the 
lawn was in under the grove on an apparently 
natural, irregular crest fine. Moreover the 
grove was out on the lawn with an even more 
natural haphazard bordering line; for another 

24 




'The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in 
under the grove was one of the early tasks of My Own Acre." 

At the point where the party is drinking tea (the site of the Indian mound) the overian of 
grove and lawn ,s eighty-five feet across the old fence line that once sharply divided Ihem 



MY OWN ACRE 

operation had been carried on meantime. Trees, 
souvenir trees, had from time to time been 
planted on the lawn by visiting friends. Most 
of them are set close enough to the grove to 
become a part of it, standing in a careful irregu- 
larity which has already obliterated, without mo- 
lesting, the tree line of the ancient fence. 

Young senators among their seniors, they still 
have much growth to make before they can enter 
into their full forest dignity, yet Henry Ward 
Beecher's elm is nearly two feet through and has 
a spread of fifty; Max O'Rell's white- ash is a 
foot in diameter and fifty feet high; Edward 
Atkinson's is something more, and Felix Adler's 
hemlock-spruce, the maple of Anthony Hope 
Hawkins, L. Clark Seelye's English ash, Henry 
van Dyke's white-ash, Sol Smith Russell's lin- 
den, and Hamilton Wright Mabie's horse-chest- 
nut are all about thirty-five feet high and cast a 
goodly shade. Sir James M. Barrie's elm — his 
and Sir William Robertson NicoU's, who planted 
it with him later than the plantings aforemen- 
tioned — has, by some virtue in the soil or in its 
own energies, reached a height of nearly sixty- 

25 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

five feet and a diameter of sixteen inches. 
Other souvenirs are a horse-chestnut planted by 
Minnie Maddern Fiske, a ginkgo by Ahce Free- 
man Palmer, a beech by Paul van Dyke, a horse- 
chestnut by Anna Hempstead Branch, another 
by Sir Sidney Lee, yet another by Mary E. 
Burt, a catalpa by Madelaine Wynne, a Colo- 
rado blue spruce — fitly placed after much labor 
of mind — by Sir Moses Ezekiel, and a Kentucky 
coffee-tree by Gerald Stanley Lee and Jennette 
Lee, of our own town. Among these should also 
stand the maple of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but 
it was killed in its second winter by an unde- 
tected mouse at its roots. Except Sir Moses, 
all the knights here named received the accolade 
after their tree plantings, but I draw no moral. 
Would it were practicable to transmit to those 
who may know these trees in later days the 
scenes of their setting out and to tell just how 
the words were said which some of the planters 
spoke. Mr. Beecher, lover of young trees and 
young children, straightened up after pressing 
the soil about the roots with hands as well as 
feet and said: *'I cannot wish you to live as 

26 




" Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting 

friends." 

The Beecher elm, first of the souvenir trees. 



MY OWN ACRE 

long as this tree, but may your children's chil- 
dren and their children sit under its shade." 
Said Felix Adler to his hemlock-spruce, " Vivat, 
crescat, floreat"; and a sentiment much like it 
was implied in Sol Smith RusselFs words to the 
grove's master as they finished putting in his 
linden together — for he was just then propos- 
ing to play Rip Van Winkle, which Joseph Jef- 
ferson had finally decided to produce no more: 
"Here's to your healt', undt der healt' of all 
your family; may you lif long undt brosper." 

We — the first person singular grows tiresome 
— ^we might have now, on our acre, a tree 
planted by Joseph Jefferson had we thought in 
time to be provided with a sapling, growing, in a 
tub. Have your prospective souvenir tree al- 
ready tubbed and waiting. This idea I got from 
Andrew Carnegie, with whom I had the honor 
to plant an oak at Skibo Castle and from whom 
I, like so many others, have had other things 
almost as good as ideas. Have your prospective 
souvenir tree tubbed and the tub sunk in the 
ground, of course, to its rim. Then the dear 
friend can plant it at any time that he may 

%1 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

chance along between March and December. 
But let no souvenir tree, however planted, be 
treated, after planting, as other than a hving 
thing if you would be just to it, to your friend, 
or to yourself. Cultivate it; coax it on; and it 
will grow two or three or four times as fast as if 
left to fight its daily battle for life unaided. And 
do not forbear to plant trees because they grow 
so slowly. They need not. They do not. With 
a little attention they grow so swiftly ! Before 
you know it you are sitting in their shade. Be- 
sides Sir Arthur's maple the only souvenir tree 
we have lost was a tulip-tree planted by my friend 
of half a lifetime, the late Franklin H. Head. 

So much for my grove. I write of it not in 
self-complacency. My many blunders, some of 
them yet to be made, are a good insurance 
against that. I write because of the countless 
acres as good as mine, in this great, dear Amer- 
ica, which might now be giving their owners all 
the healthful pastime, private solace, or solitary 
or social delights which this one yields, yet which 
are only "waste lands" or "holes in the ground" 
because unavailable for house lots or tillage. 

28 



MY OWN ACRE 

And now as to the single acre by measure, of 
lawn, shrubs, and plants, close around my house; 
for the reason that it was and is my school of 
gardening. There was no garden here — I write 
this in the midst of it — when I began. Ten 
steps from where I sit there had been a small 
Indian mound which some one had carefully 
excavated. I found stone arrow chips on the 
spot, and one whole arrow-head. So here no 
one else's earlier skill was in evidence to point 
my course or impede it. This was my clean 
new slate and at that time I had never "done a 
sum" in gardening and got anything like a right 
answer. 

It is emphatically an amateur garden and a 
book garden : a garden which to me, as to most of 
us, would have been impossible in any but these 
days when the whole art of gardening has been 
printed in books and no amateur is excusable for 
trying to garden without reading them, or for 
saying after having read them that he has 
planned and worked without professional advice. 
The books are the professional advice, with few 
drawbacks and with the great advantage that 

29 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

they are ours truly and do not even have to be 
"'phoned." I should rather have in my library 
my Bailey's "American Cyclopedia of Horticul- 
ture," than any two garden periodicals once a 
month. These, too, I value, but, for me, they are 
over-apt to carry too much deckload of the ad- 
vice and gentle vauntings of other amateurs. 
I have an amateur's abhorrence of amateurs ! 
The Cyclopedia knows, and will always send me 
to the right books if it cannot thresh a matter out 
with me itself. Before Bailey my fount of knowl- 
edge was Mr. E. J. Canning, late of Smith Col- 
lege Botanic Gardens; a spring still far from dry. 

As the books enjoin, I began my book-garden- 
ing with a plan on paper; not the elaborate thing 
one pays for when he can give his garden more 
money than time, but a light sketch, a mere 
fundamental suggestion. This came profession- 
ally from a landscape-architect, Miss Frances 
Bullard, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who had 
just finished plotting the grounds of my neigh- 
bor, the college. 

I tell of my own garden for another reason: 
that it shows, I think, how much can be done 

30 



MY OWN ACRE 

with how Httle, if for the doing you take time 
instead of money. All things come to the gar- 
den that knows how to wait. Mine has acquired 
at leisure a group of effects which would have 
cost from ten to twenty times as much if got 
in a hurry. Garden for ten-year results and get 
them for next to nothing, and at the same time 
you may quicken speed whenever your exchequer 
smiles broadly enough. Of course this argu- 
ment is chiefly for those who have the time 
and not the money; for by time we mean play 
time, time which is money lost if you don't 
play. The garden that gives the most joy, "Joy- 
ous Gard," as Sir Launcelot named his, is not to 
be bought, like a Circassian slave; it must be 
brought up, like a daughter. How much of life 
they can miss who can buy whatever they want 
whenever they want it ! 

But I tell first of my own garden also because 
I believe it summarizes to the eye a number of 
primary book-rules, authoritative "don'ts," by 
the observance of which a multitude of amateur 
gardeners may get better results than it yet 
shows. Nevertheless, I will hardly do more than 

31 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

note a few exceptions to these ground rules, 
which may give the rules a more convincing 
force. First of all, ''don't" let any of your 
planting cut or spHt your place in two. How 
many a small house-lot lawn we see split down 
the middle by a row of ornamental shrubs or 
fruit-trees which might as easily have been set 
within a few feet of the property line, whose 
rigidity, moreover, would have best excused the 
rigidity of the planted line. But such glaring 
instances aside, there are many subtler ones 
quite as unfortunate; "don't" be too sure you 
are not unwittingly furnishing one. 

''Don't" destroy the openness of your sward 
by dotting it with shrubs or pattern flower-beds. 
To this rule I doubt if a plausible exception could 
be contrived. It is so sweeping and so primary 
that we might well withhold it here were we 
not seeking to state its artistic reason why. 
Which is, that such plantings are mere eruptions 
of individual smartness, without dignity and 
with no part in any general unity; chirping up 
like pert children in a company presumably try- 
ing to be rational. 

32 



MY OWN ACRE 

On the other hand, I hope my acre, despite all 
its unconscious or unconfessed mistakes, shows 
pleasantly that the best openness of a lawn is not 
to be got between unclothed, right-angled and 
parallel bounds. The more its verdure-clad 
borders swing in and out the longer they look, 
not merely because they are longer but also 
because they interest and lure the eye. "Where 
are you going .f^" says the eye. 

"Come and see," says the roaming line. 

"Don't" plant in stiff lines except in close 
relation to architectural or legal bounds. A 
straight horizontal line Nature scarcely knows 
save in her rocks and on a vaster scale than we 
here have to do with. Yet straight lines in gar- 
dening are often good and fine if only they are 
lines of real need. Where, when and in what 
degree it is good to subordinate utility to beauty 
or beauty to utility depends on time, place and 
circumstance, but when in doubt "don't" pinch 
either to pet the other. Oppression is never 
good art. Yet "don't" cry war, war, where 
there is no war. A true beauty and a needed 
utility may bristle on first collision but they soon 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

make friends. Was it not Ruskin himseK who 
wanted to butt the railway-train off the track 
and paw up the rails — something like that ? 
But even between them and the landscape 
there is now an entente cordiale. I have seen 
the hand of Joseph Pennell make beautiful 
peace with billboards and telegraph-poles and 
wires. 

The railway points us to the fact that along 
the ground Nature is as innocent of parallel lines, 
however bent, as of straight ones, and that in 
landscape-gardening parallels should be avoided 
unless they are lines of utility. *' Don't" lay 
parallel lines, either straight or curved, where 
Nature would not and utility need not. Yet 
my own acre has taught me a modification of 
this rule so marked as to be almost an excep- 
tion. On each side of me next my nearest 
neighbor I have a turfed alley between a contin- 
uous bed of flowering shrubs and plants next the 
division line, and a similar bed whose meander- 
ings border my lawn. At first I gave these two 
alleys a sinuous course in correspondence with 
the windings of the bed bordering the lawn — 

34 



MY OWN ACRE 

for they were purely ways of pleasure among 
the flowers, and a loitering course seemed only 
reasonable. But sinuous lines proved as dis- 
appointing in the alleys as they were satisfying 
out on the lawn, and by and by I saw that 
whereas the bendings of the open lawn's borders 
lured and rewarded the eye, the same curves in 
the alleys obstructed and baffled it. The show 
of floral charms was piecemeal, momentary and 
therefore trivial. "Don't" be trivial ! 

But a cure was easy. I had to straighten but 
one side of each alley to restore the eye's freedom 
of perspective, and nothing more was wanting. 
The American eye's freedom of perspective is 
one of our great liberties. 

Oh, say, can you see — ? 

I made this change, of course, on the side 
nearest the straight, property-division bound, 
where ran an invisible wire fence. Thus the bed 
on that side was set between two straight par- 
allels, while the bed on the lawn side remained 
between waving parallels. This gave the best 
simplicity with the least artificiality. And thus 

35 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

the two lanes are open to view from end to end, 
yet each has two deep bays on the side nearest 
the lawn, bays which remain unseen till one ac- 
tually reaches them in traversing the lane. In 
such a bay one should always have, I think, some 
floral revelation of special charm worthy of the 
seclusion and the surprise. But this thought is 
only one of a hundred that tell me my garden 
is not a finished thing. To its true lover a 
garden never is. 

Another sort of bay, the sort resulting from a 
swift retreat of a line of shrubberies pursued by 
the lawn and then swinging round and returning 
upon the lawn in a counter pursuit, I thought I 
had learned from books and Miss Bullard and 
had established on my own acre, until I saw the 
college gardens of Oxford, England, and the 
landscape work in Hyde Park, London. On my 
return thence I made haste to give my own gar- 
den's in-and-out curves twice the boldness they 
had had. And doubling their boldness I doubled 
their beauty. ''Don't" ever let your acre's, or 
half or quarter acre's, ground lines relax into 
feebleness or shrink into pettiness. "Don't" 

36 




"The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays on the 
side nearest the lawn." 

The straight line of high growth conceals in the midst of its foliage a wire division fence, 
and makes a perfect background for blooming herbaceous perennials. 



MY OWN ACRE 

ever plan a lay-out for whose free swing your 
limits are cramped. 

"Don't" ever, if you can help it, says another 
of my old mistakes to me, let your acre lead 
your guest to any point which can be departed 
from only by retracing one's steps. Such neces- 
sities involve a lapse — not to say collapse — of 
interest, which makes for dulness and loss of 
dignity. Lack what my own acre may, I have 
it now so that by its alleys, lawns and contour 
paths in garden and grove we can walk and walk 
through every part of it without once meeting 
our own tracks, and that is not all because of 
the pleasant fact that the walks, where not 
turfed, are covered with pine-straw, of which 
each new September drops us a fresh harvest. 

A garden, we say, should never compel us to 
go back the way we came; but in truth a garden 
should never compel us to do anything. Its 
don'ts should be laid solely on itself. Those ap- 
plicable to its master, mistress, or guests should 
all be impossibilities, not requests. "Private 
grounds, no crossing" — take that away, please, 
wherever you can, and plant your margins so 

37 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

that there can be no crossing. Wire nettings 
hidden by shrubberies from all but the shame- 
less trespasser you will find far more effective, 
more promotive to beauty and more courteous. 
"Don't" make your garden a garden of don'ts. 
For no garden is quite a garden until it is 
"Joyous Gard." Let not yours or mine be a 
garden for display. Then our rhododendrons 
and like splendors will not be at the front gate, 
and our grounds be less and less worth seeing the 
farther into them we go. Nor let yours or mine 
be a garden of pride. The ways of such a garden 
are not pleasantness nor its paths peace. And let 
us not have a garden of tiring care or a user up 
of precious time. That is not good citizenship. 
Neither let us have an old-trousers, sun-bonnet, 
black finger-nails garden — especially if you are a 
woman. A garden that makes a wife, daughter 
or sister a dowdy is hardly "Joyous Gard." 
Neither is one which makes itself a mania to her 
and an affliction to her family. Let us not even 
have, you or me, a wonder garden — of arboreal 
or floral curiosities. Perhaps because I have not 
travelled enough I have never seen a garden of 



I 



MY OWN ACRE 

exotics that was a real garden in any good art 
sense; in any way, that is, lastingly pleasing to a 
noble spirit. Let your garden, and let mine, be 
the garden of joy. For the only way it can be 
that, on and on, year in, year out, is to be so good 
in art and so finely human in its purposes that 
to have it and daily keep it will make us more 
worth while to ourselves and to mankind than 
to go without it. 



39 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

A LMOST any good American will admit it to 
-^ ^ be a part of our national social scheme, I 
think, — if we have a social scheme, — that 
everybody shall aspire to all the refinements of 
life. 

Particularly is it our theory that every one 
shall propose to give to his home all the joys and 
graces which are anywhere associated with the 
name of home. Yet until of late we have neg- 
lected the art of gardening. Now and then we 
see, or more likely we read about, some garden of 
wonderful beauty; but the very fame of it points 
the fact that really artistic gardening is not 
democratically general with us. 

Our cities and towns, without number, have 
the architect and the engineer, for house and for 
landscape, for sky-scrapers and all manner of 
pubHc works; we have the nurseryman, the 
florist; we have parks, shaded boulevards and 
riverside and lakeside drives. Under private 

43 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

ownership we have a vast multitude of exactly 
rectilinear lawns, extremely bare or else very 
badly planted; and we have hundreds of thou- 
sands of beautiful dames and girls who "love 
flowers." But our home gardens, our home gar- 
deners, either professional or amateur, where are 
they? Our smaller cities by scores and our 
towns by hundreds are full of home-dwellers each 
privately puzzled to know why every one of his 
neighbors' houses, however respectable in archi- 
tecture, stares at him and after him with a va- 
cant, deaf-mute air of having just landed in this 
coimtry, without friends. 

What ails these dwellings is largely lack of 
true gardening. They will never look like 
homes, never look really human and benign, that 
is, until they are set in a gardening worthy of 
them. For a garden which ahke in its dignity 
and in its modesty is worthy of the house around 
which it is set, is the smile of the place. 

In the small city of Northampton, Massachu- 
setts, there has been for many years an annual 
prize competition of amateur flower-gardens. 
In 1913 there were over a thousand homes, 

44 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

about one-fourth of all the dwellings in the 
town, in this pretty contest. Not all, not half, 
these competitors could make a show worthy 
the name of good gardening, but every one of 
these households stood pledged to do something 
during the year for the outdoor improvement 
of the home, and hundreds of their house lots 
were florally beautiful. If I seem to hurry into 
a mention of it here it is partly in the notion 
that such a recital may be my best credentials as 
the writer of these pages, and partly in the 
notion that such a concrete example may possi- 
bly have a tendency to help on flower-gardening 
in the country at large and even to aid us in de- 
termining what American flower-gardening had 
best be. 

For the reader's better advantage, however, 
let me first state one or two general ideas which 
have given this activity and its picturesque re- 
sults particular aspects and not others. 

I lately heard a lady ask an amateur gar- 
dener, "What is the garden's foundation prin- 
ciple.?" 

There was a certain overgrown pomp in the 

45 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

question's form, but that is how she very mod- 
estly asked it, and I will take no liberty with its 
construction. I thought his reply a good one. 

''We have all," he said, "come up from wild 
nature. In wild nature there are innumerable 
delights, but they are qualified by countless in- 
conveniences. The cave, tent, cabin, cottage 
and castle have gradually been evolved by an 
orderly accumulation and combination of de- 
fences and conveniences which secure to us a 
host of advantages over wild nature and wild 
man. Yet rightly we are loath to lose any more 
of nature than we must in order to be her mas- 
ters and her children in one, and to gather from 
her the largest fund of profit and delight she can 
be made to yield. Hence around the cottage, 
the castle or the palace waves and blooms the 
garden." 

Was he not right ? This is why, in our pleas- 
ant Northampton affair, we have accepted it as 
our first rule of private gardening that the house 
is the climacteric note. 

This is why the garden should never be more 
architectural and artificial than the house of 

46 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

which it is the setting, and this is why the gar- 
den should grow less and less architectural and 
artificial as it draws away from the house. To 
say the same thing in reverse, the garden, as it 
approaches the house, should accept more and 
more discipline — domestication — social refine- 
ment, until the house itself at length seems as 
unabruptly and naturally to grow up out of 
the garden as the high keynote rises at the end 
of a lady's song. 

By this understanding of the matter what a 
fine truce-note is blown between the contending 
advocates of "natural" and of ''formal" garden- 
ing! The right choice between these two as- 
pects of the art, and the right degree in either 
choice, depend on the character of the house. 
The house is a part of the garden. It is the gar- 
den's brow and eyes. In gardening, almost the 
only thing which costs unduly is for us to try to 
give our house some other house's garden. 
One's private garden should never be quite so 
far removed from a state of nature as his house 
is. Its leading function should be to delight its 
house's inmates (and intimates) in things of 

47 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

nature so refined as to inspire and satisfy their 
happiest moods. Therefore no garden should 
cost, nor look as if it cost, an outlay of money, 
time or toil that cramps the house's own abiUty 
to minister to the genuine bodily needs and 
spiritual enlargements of its indwellers; and 
therefore, also, it should never seem to cost, in 
its first making or in its daily keeping, so much 
pains as to lack, itself, a garden's supreme essen- 
tial — tranquillity. 

So, then, to those who would incite whole 
streets of American towns to become florally 
beautiful, "formal" gardening seems hardly the 
sort to recommend. About the palatial dwellings 
of men of princely revenue it may be enchanting. 
There it appears quite in place. For with all its 
exquisite artificiality it still is nearer to nature 
than the stately edifice it surroimds and adorns. 
But for any less costly homes it costs too much. 
It is expensive in its first outlay and it demands 
constantly the greatest care and the highest 
skill. Our ordinary American life is too busy 
for it unless the ground is quite handed over to 
the hired professional and openly betrays itself 

48 




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biO 




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a o 








m 


o 




^^ 


cS 






o 


o3 




.i 1 




O 




-o 



"^ e 



,^ ai 



84-, ^ 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

as that very unsatisfying thing, a ''gardener's 
garden." 

Our ordinary American hfe is also too near 
nature for the formal garden to come in between. 
Unless our formal gardening is of some inexpen- 
sive sort our modest dwelling-houses give us an 
anti-climax, and there is no inexpensive sort 
of formal gardening. Except in the far south 
our American climate expatriates it. 

A very good practical rule would be for none 
of us to venture upon such gardening until he is 
well able to keep up an adequate greenhouse. 
A formal garden without a greenhouse or two — 
or three — is a glorious army on a war footing, 
but without a base of supplies. It is largely his 
greenhouses which make the public gardener 
and the commercial florist so misleading an ex- 
ample for the cottager to follow in his private 
gardening. 

To be beautiful, formal gardening requires 
stately proportions. Without these it is almost 
certain to be petty and frivolous. In the tiny 
gardens of British and European peasants, it is 
true, a certain formality of design is often prac- 

49 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

tised with pleasing success; but these gardens are 
a by-product of peasant toil, and in America we 
have no joy in contemplating an American 
home limited to the aspirations of peasant life. 
In such gardening there is a constraint, a lack of 
natural freedom, a distance from nature, and a 
certain contented subserviency, which makes it 
— however fortunate it may be under other so- 
cial conditions — wholly unfit to express the 
buoyant, not to say exuberant, complacencies of 
the American home. For these we want, what 
we have not yet quite evolved, the American 
garden. When this comes it must come, of 
course, imconsciously; but we may be sure it will 
not be much like the gardens of any politically 
shut-in people. No, not even of those supreme 
artists in gardening, the Japanese. It will ex- 
press the traits of our American domestic life; 
our strong individuality and self-assurance, our 
sense of unguarded security, our affability and 
unexclusiveness and our dislike to high-walled 
privacy. If we would hasten its day we must 
make way for it along the lines of these traits. 
On the other hand, if in following these lines 

50 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

we can contrive to adhere faithfully to the world- 
wide laws of all true art, who knows but our very 
gardening may tend to correct more than one 
shortcoming or excess in our national character ? 
In our Northampton experiment it has been 
our conviction from the beginning that for a 
private garden to be what it should be — to 
have a happy individuality — a countenance of 
its own — one worthy to be its own — it must 
in some practical way be the fruit of its house- 
holder's own spirit and not merely of some hired 
gardener's. If one can employ a landscape-archi- 
tect, all very well; but the most of us cannot, 
and after all, the true landscape-architect, the 
artist gardener, works on this principle and 
seeks to convey into every garden distinctively 
the soul of the household for which it springs and 
flowers. 

"Since when it grows and smells, I swear, 
Not of itself but thee." 

Few American householders, however, have 
any enthusiasm for this theory, which many 
would call high-strung, and as we in Northamp- 
ton cannot undertake to counsel and direct our 

51 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

neighbors' hired helps, we enroll in the main 
branch of our competition only those who garden 
for themselves and hire no labor. To such the 
twenty-one prizes, ranging from two dollars and 
a half up to fifteen dollars, are a strong incentive, 
and by such the advice of visiting committees is 
eagerly sought and followed. The public edu- 
cative value of the movement is probably largest 
under these limitations, for in this way we show 
what beautiful results may be got on smallest 
grounds and with the least outlay. Its private 
educative value, too, is probably largest thus, 
because thus we disseminate as a home delight a 
practical knowledge of aesthetic principles among 
those who may at any time find it expedient to 
become wage-earning gardeners on the home 
grounds of the well-to-do. 

The competing gardens being kept wholly 
without hired labor, of course our constant ad- 
vice to all contestants is to shun formal garden- 
ing. It is a pity that in nearly all our cities and 
towns the most notable examples of gardening 
are found in the parks, boulevards, and ceme- 
teries. By these fiaring displays thousands of 
modest cottagers who might easily provide, on 

52 




"Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds." 

This IS half of a back yard, the whole of which is equally handsome. The place to which it 
belongs took a capital prize in the Carnegie Flower Garden Competition. 




"MulHe your architectural angles in foliage and bloom/' 

An invisible fault of this planting is that it was set too close to the building and tended 
to give an impression, probably groundless, of promoting dampness. Also it was an 
mconvenience to mechanics in painting or repairing. 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

their small scale, lovely gardens about their 
dwellings at virtually no cost and with no bur- 
densome care, get a notion that this, and this 
only, is artistic gardening and hence that a home 
garden for oneself would be too expensive and 
troublesome to be thought of. On the other 
hand, a few are tempted to mimic them on a 
petty scale, and so spoil their little grass-plots 
and amuse, without entertaining, their not more 
tasteful but only less aspiring neighbors. In 
Northampton, in our Carnegie prize contest — 
so called for a very sufficient and pleasant reason 
— our counsel is to avoid all mimicry in garden- 
ing as we would avoid it in speech or in gait. 
Sometimes we do not mind being repetitious. 
"In gardening," we say — as if we had never 
said it before — "almost the only thing which 
costs unduly — in money or in mortification — 
is for one to try to give himself somebody else's 
garden !" Often we say this twice to the same 
person. 

One of the reasons we give against it is that it 
leads to toy gardening, and toy gardening is of 
all sorts the most pitiful and ridiculous. "No 
true art," we say, "can tolerate any make-be- 

53 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

lieve which is not in some way finer than the 
reahty it simulates. In other words, imitation 
should always be in the nature of an amiable 
condescension. Whatever falseness, pretension 
or even mere frailty or smallness, suggests to the 
eye the ineffectuality of a toy is out of place in 
any sort of gardening." We do not actually 
speak all this, but we imply it, and we often find 
that the mere utterance of the one word, "toy 
gardening," has a magical effect to suggest all the 
rest and to overwhelm with contrition the bad 
taste and frivolity of many a misguided attempt 
at adornment. At that word of exorcism joints 
of cerulean sewer-pipe crested with scarlet ge- 
raniums, rows of whited cobbles along the walk 
or drive like a cannibal's skulls around his hut, 
purple paint-kegs of petunias on the scanty door- 
steps, crimson wash-kettles of verbenas, ant-hill 
rockeries, and well-sweeps and curbs where no 
wells are, steal modestly and forever into obliv- 
ion. 

Now, when we so preach we try also to make 
it very plain that there is not one set of rules for 
gardening on a small scale of expense in a small 
piece of ground, and another set for gardening on 

54 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

a larger scale. For of course the very thing 
which makes the small garden diflFerent from the 
large, the rich man's from the poor man's, the 
Scotch or Italian peasant's from the American 
mechanic's, or the public garden from the pri- 
vate, is the universal and immutable oneness of 
the great canons of art. One of our competi- 
tors, having honestly purged her soul of every 
impulse she may ever have had to mimic the 
gardening of the cemeteries, planted her door- 
yard with a trueness of art which made it the 
joy of all beholders. Only then was it that a 
passing admirer stopped and cried: "Upon me 
soul, Mrs. Anonyma, yir gy air den looks joost 
loike a pooblic pairk!" He meant — without 
knowing it — that the spot was lovely for not 
trying to look the least bit like a public park, 
and he was right. She had kept what it would 
be well for the public gardeners to keep much 
better than some of them do — the Moral Law 
of Gardening. 

There is a moral law of gardening. No gar- 
den should ever tell a lie. No garden should 

55 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

ever put on any false pretence. No garden 
should ever break a promise. To the present 
reader these proclamations may seem very trite; 
it may seem very trite to say that if anything 
in or of a garden is meant for adornment, it must 
adorn; but we have to say such things to many 
who do not know what trite means — who think 
it is something you buy from the butcher. A 
thing meant for adornment, we tell them, must 
so truly and sufficiently adorn as to be worth 
all the room and attention it takes up. Thou 
shalt not let anything in thy garden take away 
thy guest's attention without repaying him for 
it; it is stealing. 

A lady, not in our competition but one of its 
most valued patronesses, lately proposed to her- 
self to place in the centre of a wide, oval lawn a 
sun-dial and to have four paths cross the grass 
and meet there. But on reflection the query 
came to her — 

''In my unformal garden of simplest grove 
and sward will a sun-dial — posing in an office it 
never performed there, and will never again be 
needed for anywhere — a cabinet relic now — 

56 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

will a "posed sun-dial be interesting enough when 
it is arrived at to justify a special journey and 
four kept-up paths which cut my beautiful grass- 
plot into quarters?" 

With that she changed her mind — a thing 
the good gardener must often do — and ap- 
pointed the dial to a place where one comes upon 
it quite incidentally while moving from one 
main feature of the grounds to another. It is 
now a pleasing, mild surprise instead of a tame 
fulfilment of a showy promise; pleasing, after all, 
it must, however, be admitted, to the toy-loving 
spirit, since the sun-dial has long been, and 
henceforth ever will be, an utterly useless thing 
in a garden, only true to art when it stands in an 
old garden, a genuine historical survival of its 
day of true utility. Only in such a case does 
the sun-dial belong to the good morals of gar- 
dening. But maybe this is an overstrict rule 
for the majority of us who are much too fond 
of embellishments and display — the rouge and 
powder of high art. 

On the other hand, we go to quite as much 
pains to say that though a garden may not lie 

57 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

nor steal, it may have its concealments; they are 
as right as they are valuable. One of the first 
steps in the making of a garden should be to de- 
termine what to hide and how most gracefully 
to hide it. A garden is a house's garments, its 
fig-leaves, as we may say, and the garden's con- 
cealments, like its revelations, ought always to 
be in the interest of comfort, dignity, and charm. 

We once had a very bumptious member on our 
board of judges. "My dear madam!" he ex- 
claimed to an aspirant for the prizes, the under- 
pinning of whose dwelling stood out unconcealed 
by any sprig of floral growth, "your house is 
barefooted ! Nobody wants to see your house's 
underpinning, any more than he wants to see 
your own ! " 

It is not good to be so brusque about non- 
penitentiary offences, but skilful and lovely con- 
cealments in gardening were his hobby. To an- 
other he whispered, "My dear sir, tell your 
pretty house her petticoat shows!" and to yet 
another, "Take all those shrubs out of the mid- 
dle of your lawn and 'plant out' with them every 
feature of your house which would be of no in- 

58 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

terest to you if the house were not yours. Your 
house's morals may be all right, but its manners 
are insufferable, it talks so much about itself and 
its family." To a fourth he said: ''In a garden- 
ing sense your house makes too much noise; you 
can hear its right angles hit the ground. Muffle 
them ! Muffle your architectural angles in foli- 
age and bloom. Up in the air they may be ever 
so correct and fine, but down in the garden and 
unclothed they are heinous, heinous !" 

Another precept we try to inculcate in our 
rounds among the gardens, another command- 
ment in the moral law of gardening, is that with 
all a garden's worthy concealments it should 
never, and need never, be frivolous or be lacking 
in candor. I know an amateur gardener — and 
the amateur gardener, like the amateur pho- 
tographer, sometimes ranks higher than the pro- 
fessional — who is at this moment altering the 
location of a sidewalk gate which by an earlier 
owner was architecturally misplaced for the sole 
purpose of making a path with curves — and 
such curves ! — instead of a straight and honest 
one, from the street to the kitchen. When a 

59 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

path is sent on a plain business errand it should 
never loaf. And yet those lines of a garden's 
layout which are designed not for business but 
for pleasure, should never behave as though they 
were on business; they should loiter just enough 
to make their guests feel at ease, while not 
enough to waste time. How like a perfect lady, 
or a perfect gentleman, is — however humble or 
exalted its rank — a garden with courtly man- 
ners ! 

As to manners, our incipient American garden 
has already developed one trait which dis- 
tinguishes it from those beyond the Atlantic. 
It is a habit which reminds one of what some- 
body has lately said about Americans them- 
selves: that, whoever they are and whatever 
their manners may be, they have this to their 
credit, that they unfailingly desire and propose 
to be polite. The thing we are hinting at is our 
American gardens' excessive openness. Our peo- 
ple have, or until just now had, almost abolished 
the fence and the hedge. A gard, yard, garth, 
garden, used to mean an enclosure, a close, and 
implied a privacy to its owner superior to any 

60 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

he enjoyed outside of it. But now that we no 
longer have any miUtary need of privacy we are 
tempted — are we not ? — to overlook its spir- 
itual value. We seem to enjoy publicity better. 
In our American eagerness to publish everything 
for everybody and to everybody, we have pub- 
lished our gardens — published them in paper 
bindings; that is to say, with their boundaries 
visible only on maps filed with the Registrar of 
Deeds. 

Foreigners who travel among us complain that 
we so overdo our good-natured endurance of 
every public inconvenience that we have made 
it a national misfortune and are losing our sense 
of our public rights. This obliteration of private 
boundaries is an instance. Our public spirit and 
out imperturbability are flattered by it, but our 
gardens, except among the rich, have become 
American by ceasing to be gardens. 

I have a neighbor who every year plants a 
garden of annuals. He has no fence, but two 
of his neighbors have each a setter dog. These 
dogs are rarely confined. One morning I saw 
him put in the seed of his lovely annuals and 

61 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

leave his smoothly raked beds already a pleasant 
show and a prophecy of delight while yet with- 
out a spray of green. An hour later I saw those 
two setter dogs wrestling and sprawling around 
in joyous circles all over those garden beds. 
''Gay, guiltless pair!" What i^ one to do in 
such a case, in a land where everybody is ex- 
pected to take everything good-naturedly, and 
where a fence is sign of a sour temper ? Of course 
he can do as others do, and have no garden. 
But to have no garden is a distinct poverty in 
a householder's life, whether he knows it or not, 
and — suppose he very much wants a garden? 
They were the well-to-do who began this 
abolition movement against enclosures and I 
have an idea it never would have had a begin- 
ning had there prevailed generally, democratic- 
ally, among us a sentiment for real gardening, 
and a knowledge of its practical principles; for 
with this sentiment and knowledge we should 
have had that sweet experience of outdoor pri- 
vacy for lack of which we lose one of the noblest 
charms of home. The well-to-do started the 
fashion, it cost less money to follow than to with- 
er 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

stand it and presently the landlords of the poor 
utilized it. 

The poor man — the poor woman — needs 
the protection of a fence to a degree of which 
the well-to-do know nothing. In the common 
interest of the whole community, of any com- 
munity, the poor man — the poor woman — 
ought to have a garden; but if they are going to 
have a garden they ought to have a fence. We 
in Northampton know scores of poor homes 
whose tenants strive year after year to establish 
some floral beauty about them, and fail for want 
of enclosures. The neighbors' children, their 
dogs, their cats, geese, ducks, hens — it is use- 
less. Many refuse to make the effort; some, I 
say, make it and give it up, and now and then 
some one wins a surprising and delightful suc- 
cess. Two or three such have taken high prizes 
in our competition. The two chief things which 
made their triumph possible were, first, an 
invincible passion for gardening, and, second, 
poultry-netting. 

A great new boon to the home gardener they 
are, these wire fencings and nettings. With 

63 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

them ever so many things may be done now at a 
quarter or tenth of what they would once have 
cost. Our old-fashioned fences were sometimes 
very expensive, sometimes very perishable, some- 
times both. Also they were apt to be very ugly. 
Yet instead of concealing them we made them a 
display, while the shrubbery which should have 
masked them in leaf and bloom stood scattered 
over the lawn, each little new bush by itseK, vis- 
ibly if not audibly saying — 

"You'd scarce expect one of my age ^" 

etc. ; the shrubs orphaned, the lawn destroyed. 

If the enclosure was a hedge it had to be a tight 
one or else it did not enclose. Now wire net- 
ting charms away these embarrassments. Your 
hedge can be as loose as you care to have it, while 
your enclosure may be rigidly effective yet be 
hidden from the eye by undulating fence-rows; 
and as we now have definite bounds and corners 
to plant out, we do not so often as formerly need 
to be reminded of Frederick Law Olmsted's fa- 
vorite maxim, ''Take care of the corners, and the 
centres will take care of themselves." 







in e^ J-> 



o _ 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

Here there is a word to be added in the inter- 
est of home-lovers, whose tastes we properly 
expect to find more highly trained than those of 
the average tenant cottager. Our American 
love of spaciousness leads us to fancy that — 
not to-day or to-morrow, but somewhere in a 
near future — we are going to unite our unfenced 
lawns in a concerted park treatment: a sort 
of wee horticultural United States comprised 
within a few city squares; but ever our American 
individuaKsm stands broadly in the way, and 
our gardens almost never relate themselves to 
one another with that intimacy which their 
absence of boundaries demands in order to take 
on any special beauty, nobility, dehghtsomeness, 
of gardening. The true gardener — who, if he 
is reading this, must be getting very tired of our 
insistent triteness — carefully keeps in mind the 
laws of linear and of aerial perspective, no mat- 
ter how large or small the garden. The relative 
stature of things, both actual and prospective; 
their breadth; the breadth or slenderness, dark- 
ness or lightness, openness or density, of their 
foliage; the splendor or delicacy of their flowers, 

65 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

whether in size or in color; the season of their 
blooming; the contour of the grounds — all these 
points must be taken into account in determin- 
ing where things are to stand and how be 
grouped. Once the fence or hedge was the 
frame of the picture; but now our pictures, on 
almost any street of unpalatial, comfortable 
homes, touch edge to edge without frames, and 
the reason they do not mar one another's ef- 
fects is that they have no particular effects to 
be marred, but lie side by side as undiscord- 
antly as so many string instruments without 
strings. Let us hope for a time when they will 
rise in insurrection, resolved to be either parts 
of a private park, or each one a whole private 
garden. 

In our Carnegie prize contest nothing yields 
its judges more pleasure than to inculcate the 
garden rules of perspective to which we have 
just referred and to see the blissful complacency 
of those who successfully carry them out. I 
have now in my mind's eye a garden to which 
was awarded the capital prize of 1903. A cot- 
tage of maybe six small rooms crowns a high 

66 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

bank on a corner where two rural streets cross. 
There are a few square yards of lawn on its 
front, and still fewer (scarcely eight or ten) on 
the side next the cross-street, but on the other 
two sides there is nearly a quarter of an acre. 
On these two sides the limits touch other gar- 
dens, and all four sides are entirely without 
fencing. From the front sward have been taken 
away a number of good shrubs which once broke 
it into ineffectual bits, and these have been 
grouped against the inward and outward angles 
of the house. The front porch is garlanded — 
not smothered — with vines whose flowers are 
all white, pink, blue or light purple. About 
the base of the porch and of all the house's front, 
bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the 
tallest nearest the house, the lesser at their knees 
and feet. The edges of the beds — gentle waves 
that never degenerate to straightness — are 
thickly bordered with mignonette. Not an 
audacious thing, not a red blossom nor a strong 
yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of 
dense or dark foliage, comes into view until one 
reaches a side of the dwelling. But there at 

67 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

once he finds the second phase in a crescendo 
of floral colors. The base of the house, and es- 
pecially those empty eye-sockets, the cellar win- 
dows, are veiled in exultant bloom, yellows pre- 
dominating. Then at the back of the place 
comes the full chorus, and red flowers overmaster 
the yellow, though the delicate tints with which 
the scheme began are still present to preserve the 
dignity and suavity of all — the ladies of the 
feast. The paths are only one or two and 
they never turn abruptly and ask you to keep off 
their corners; they have none. Neither have the 
flower-beds. They flow wideningly around the 
hard turnings of the house with the grace of a 
rivulet. Out on the two wider sides of the lawn 
nothing breaks the smooth green but a well- 
situated tree or two until the limits of the prem- 
ises are reached, and there, in lines that widen 
and narrow and widen again and hide the sur- 
veyor's angles, the flowers rise once more in a 
final burst of innumerable blossoms and splendid 
hues — a kind of sunset of the garden's own. 

When this place, five seasons ago, first entered 
the competition, it could hardly be called a gar- 

68 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

den at all. Yet it was already superior to many 
rivals. In those days it seemed to us as though 
scarcely one of our working people in a hundred 
knew that a garden was anything more than a 
bed of flowers set down anywhere and anyhow. 
It was a common experience for us to be led by 
an unkept path and through a patch of weeds or 
across an ungrassed dooryard full of rubbish, 
in order to reach a so-called garden which had 
never spoken a civil word to the house nor got 
one from it. Now, the understanding is that 
every part of the premises, every outdoor thing 
on the premises — path, fence, truck-patch, sta- 
ble, stable-yard, hen-yard, tennis or croquet- 
court — everything is either a part of the gar- 
den or is so reasonably related to it that from 
whatever point one views the place he beholds a 
single satisfactory picture. 

This, I say, is the understanding. I do not 
say that even among our prize-winners anybody 
has yet perfectly attained this, although a few 
have come very near it. With these the main 
surviving drawback is that the artistic effect is 
each season so long coming and passes away 

69 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

so soon — Cometh up as a flower and presently 
has withered. 

One of our most gifted hterary critics a while 
ago pointed out the poetic charm of evanescence; 
pointed it out more plainly, I fancy, than it has 
ever been shown before. But evanescence has 
this poetic charm chiefly in nature, almost never 
in art. The transitoriness of a sunset glory, or of 
human life, is rife with poetic pathos because 
it is a transitoriness which cannot he helped. 
Therein lay the charm of that poetic wonder 
and marvel of its day (1893) the Columbian Ex- 
position's "White City"; it was an architectural 
triumph and glory which we could not have ex- 
cept on condition that it should vanish with the 
swiftness of an aurora. Even so, there would 
have been little poetry in its evanescence if, 
through bad workmanship or any obvious folly, 
it had failed to fulfll the transient purpose for 
which it was erected. The only poetic evanes- 
cence is the evanescence that is inevitable. An 
unnecessary evanescence in things we make is 
bad art. If I remember the story correctly, it 
was to a Roman lady that Benvenuto Cellini 

70 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

took the exquisite waxen model of some piece of 
goldsmithing she had commissioned him to exe- 
cute for her. So dehghted was she with this 
mere model that she longed to keep it and called 
it the perfection of art, or some such word. But 
Benvenuto said, No, he could not claim for it 
the high name of art until he should have repro- 
duced it in gold, that being the most worthy 
material in which it would endure the use for 
which it was designed. 

Unless the great Italian was in error, then, a 
garden ought not to be so largely made up of 
plants which perish with the summer as to be, 
at their death, no longer a garden. Said that 
harsh-spoken judge whom we have already once 
or twice quoted — that shepherd's-dog of a judge 
— at one of the annual bestowals of our Car- 
negie garden prizes: 

"Almost any planting about the base of a 
building, fence or wall is better than none; but 
for this purpose shrubs are far better than an- 
nual flowers. Annuals do not suflBciently mask 
the hard, offensive right-angles of the structure's 
corners or of the line whence it starts up from 

71 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

the ground. And even if sometimes they do, 
they take so long to grow enough to do it, and 
are so soon gone with the first cold blast, that 
the things they are to hide are for the most of 
the year not hidden. Besides which, even at 
their best moments, when undoubtedly they are 
very beautiful, they have not a sufficiently sub- 
stantial look to be good company for the solid 
structure they are set against. Sweetly, mod- 
estly, yet obstinately, they confess to every 
passer-by that they did not come, but were 
put there and were put there only last spring. 
Shrubs, contrariwise, give a feeling that they 
have sprung and grown there in the course of 
nature and of the years, and so convey to the 
house what so many American homes stand in 
want of — a quiet air of being long married and 
a mother of growing children. 

"Flowering shrubs of well-chosen kinds are in 
leaf two-thirds of the year, and their leafless 
branches and twigs are a pleasing relief to the 
structure's cold nakedness even through the 
winter. I have seen a house, whose mistress 
was too exclusively fond of annuals, stand wait- 

72 




After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive. 




Shrubbery versus annuals. 

The contrast in these two pictures is between two small street plantings standing in sight 
of eacli other, one of annuals with a decorative effect and lasting three months, the other 
with shrubberies and lasting nine months. 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

ing for its shoes and stockings from October clear 
round to August, and then barefooted again in 
October. In such gardening there is too much 
of love's labor lost. If one's grounds are so 
small that there is no better place for the an- 
nuals they can be planted against the shrubs, 
as the shrubs are planted against the building or 
fence. At any rate they should never be bedded 
out in the midst of the lawn, and quite as em- 
phatically they should never, alone, be set to 
mark the boundary lines of a property." 

It is hoped these sayings, quoted or other- 
wise, may seem the more in place here because 
they contemplate the aspects likely to char- 
acterize the American garden whenever that 
garden fully arrives. We like largeness. There 
are many other qualities to desire, and to desire 
even more; but if we give them also the liking 
we truly owe them it is right for us to hke 
largeness. Certainly it is better to like large- 
ness even for itself, rather than smallness for 
itself. Especially is it right that we should like 
our gardens to look as large as we can make 
them appear. Our countless lawns, naked clear 

73 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

up into their rigid corners and to their dividing 
lines, are naked in revolt against the earlier fash- 
ion of spotting them over with shrubs, the easi- 
est as well as the worst way of making a place 
look small. But a naked lawn does not make 
the premises look as large, nor does it look as 
large itself, as it will if planted in the manner 
we venture to commend to our Northampton 
prize-seekers. Between any two points a line of 
shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, grace- 
ful undulations appears much longer than a 
straight one, because it is longer. But, over 
and above this, it makes the distance between 
the two points seem greater. Everybody knows 
the old boast of the landscape-architects — that 
they can make one piece of ground look twice as 
large as another of the same measure, however 
small, by merely grading and planting the two 
on contrary schemes. The present writer knows 
one small street in his town, a street of fair 
dwellings, on which every lawn is diminished 
to the eye by faulty grading. 

For this he has no occasion to make himself 
responsible but there are certain empty lots not 

74 




Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South Hall, Wil- 
liston Seminary. (See "Where to Plant What.") 



I^^^HlHKNilUySflHHHHHKL.~4im@Hlji9 


W^' ~ ' _^HV^HI 




W^mrnU 







" . . .a line of shrubberj'^ swinging in and out in strong, graceful undulations." 

The straight planting on this picture's left masks the back yards of three neighbors, and 
gives them a privacy as well as My Own Acre. The curved planting shows but one of 
three bends. It was here that I first made the mistake of planting a sinuous alley. (See 
"My Own Acre," p. 34.) 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

far from him for whose aspect he is answerable, 
having graded them himseK (before he knew 
how). He has repeatedly heard their depth 
estimated at ninety feet, never at more. In 
fact it is one hundred and thirty-nine. How- 
ever, he has somewhat to do also with a garden 
whose grading was quite as bad — identical, 
indeed — whose fault has been covered up and 
its depth made to seem actually greater than it 
is, entirely by a corrective planting of its shrub- 
bery. 

One of the happiest things about gardening is 
that when it is bad you can always — you and 
time — you and year after next — make it good. 
It is very easy to think of the plants, beds and 
paths of a garden as things which, being once 
placed, must stay where they are; but it is short- 
sighted and it is fatal to effective gardening. 
We should look upon the arrangement of things 
in our garden very much as a housekeeper looks 
on the arrangement of the furniture in her house. 
Except buildings, pavements and great trees — 
and not always excepting the trees — we should 
regard nothing in it as permanent architecture 

75 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

but only as furnishment and decoration. At 
favorable moments you will make whatever rear- 
rangement may seem to you good. A shrub's 
mere being in a certain place is no final reason 
that it should stay there; a shrub or a dozen 
shrubs — next spring or fall you may transplant 
them. A shrub, or even a tree, may belong where 
it is this season, and the next and the next; 
and yet in the fourth year, because of its excessive 
growth, of the more desired growth of something 
else, or of some rearrangement of other things, 
that spot may be no longer the best place for it. 
Very few shrubs are injured by careful and 
seasonable, even though repeated, transplant- 
ing. Many are benefited by one or another 
effect of the process: by the root pruning they 
get, by the "division," by the change of soil, by 
change of exposure or even by backset in 
growth. Transplanting is part of a garden's 
good discipline. It is almost as necessary to 
the best results as pruning — on which grave 
subject there is no room to speak here. The 
owner even of an American garden should rule 
his garden, not be ruled by it. Yet he should 

76 



THE AMERICAN GARDEN 

rule without oppression, and it will not be truly 
American if it fails to show at a glance that 
it is not overgardened. 

Thus do we propose to exhort our next sea- 
son's competitors as this fall and winter they 
gather at our projected indoor garden-talks, or 
as we go among them to offer counsel concerning 
their grounds plans for next spring. And we 
hope not to omit to say, as we had almost omit- 
ted to say here, in behalf of the kind of garden 
we preach, that shrubs, the most of them, re- 
quire no great enrichment of the soil — an im- 
portant consideration. And we shall take much 
care to recommend the perusal of books on gar- 
dening. Once this gentle art was largely kept a 
close secret of craftsmen; but now all that can 
be put into books is in books, and the books are 
non-technical, brief and inexpensive; or if vo- 
luminous and costly, as some of the best needs 
must be, are in the pubKc hbraries. In their 
pages are a host of facts (indexed !) which once 
had to be burdensomely remembered. For one 
preoccupied with other cares — as every ama- 
teur gardener ought to be — these books are 

77 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

no mean part of his equipment; they are as 
necessary to his best gardening as the dictionary 
to his best Enghsh. 

What a daily, hourly, unfailing wonder are the 
modern opportunities and facilities by which we 
are surrounded ! If the present reader and the 
present writer, and maybe a few others, will but 
respond to them worthily, who knows but we 
may ourselves live to see, and to see as demo- 
cratically common as telephones and electric 
cars, the American garden ? Of course there is 
ever and ever so much more to be said about 
it, and the present writer is not at all weary; 
but he hears his reader's clock telling the hour 
and feels very sure it is correct. 



78 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

OFTEN one's hands are too heavily veneered 
with garden loam for him to go to his 
books to verify a quotation. It was the great 
Jefferson, was it not, who laid into the founda- 
tions of American democracy the imperishable 
maxim that ''That gardening is best which gar- 
dens the least"? My rendition of it may be 
more a parody than a quotation but, whatever 
its inaccuracy, to me it still sounds Jefferso- 
nian — Joseph Jeffersonian. 

Whether we read it ''garden" or "govern," it 
has this fine mark of a masterful utterance, that 
it makes no perceptible effort to protect itself 
against the caviller or the simpleton; from men, 
for instance, who would interpret it as meaning 
that the only perfect government, or gardening, 
is none at all. Speaking from the point of view 
of a garden-lover, I suppose the true signification 
is that the best government is the government 

81 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

which procures and preserves the noblest hap- 
piness of the community with the least enthral- 
ment of the individual. 

Now, I hope that as world-citizens and even 
as Americans we may bear in mind that, while 
this maxim may be wholly true, it is not there- 
fore the whole truth. What maxim is ? Let us 
ever keep a sweet, self-respecting modesty with 
which to confront and consort with those who 
see the science of government, or art of garden- 
ing, from the standpoint of some other equally 
true fraction of the whole truth. All we need 
here maintain for our Jeffersonian maxim is that 
its wide domination in American sentiment ex- 
plains the larger part of all the merits and 
faults of American government — and American 
gardening. It accounts for nearly all our Amer- 
ican laws and ordinances, manners, customs, 
and whims, and in the great discussion of Where 
to Plant What (in America) no one need hope 
to prevail who does not recognize that this high 
principle of American democracy is the best rule 
for American gardening. That gardening is 
best, for most Americans, which best ministers 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

to man's felicity with least disturbance of na- 
ture's freedom. 

Hence the initial question — a question which 
every amateur gardener must answer for him- 
self. How much subserviency of nature to art 
and utility is really necessary to my own and 
my friends' and neighbors' best delight ? For — 
be not deceived — however enraptured of wild 
nature you may be, you do and must require 
of her some subserviency close about your own 
dwelling. You cannot there persistently enjoy 
the wolf and the panther, the muskrat, buzzard, 
gopher, rattlesnake, poison-ivy and skunk in 
full swing, as it were. How much, then, of na- 
ture's subserviency does the range of your tastes 
demand.? Also, how much will your purse 
allow.? For it is as true in gardening as in 
statecraft that, your government being once 
genuinely estabhshed, the more of it you have, 
the more you must pay for it. In gardening, as 
in government, the cost of the scheme is not in 
proportion to the goodness or badness of its art, 
but to its intensity. 

This is why the general and very sane incli- 

83 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

nation of our American preferences is away from 
that intense sort of gardening called ''formal," 
and toward that rather unfairly termed "in- 
formal" method which here, at least, I should 
like to distinguish as "free-line" gardening. A 
free people who govern leniently will garden 
leniently. Their gardening will not be a vexing 
tax upon themselves, upon others, or upon the 
garden. Whatever freedom it takes away from 
themselves or others or the garden will be no 
more than is required for the noblest delight; 
and whatever freedom remains untaken, such 
gardening will help everybody to exercise and 
enjoy. 

The garden of free lines, provided only it be a 
real garden under a real government, is, to my 
eye, an angel's protest against every species and 
degree of tyranny and oppression, and such a 
garden, however small or extensive, will contain 
a large proportion of flowering shrubbery. Be- 
cause a garden should not, any more than my 
lady's face, have all its features — nose, eyes, 
ears, lips — of one size ? No, that is true of 
all gardening alike; but because with flowering 

84 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

shrubbery our gardening can be more lenient 
than with annuals alone, or with only herbaceous 
plants and evergreens. 

So, then, our problem. Where to Plant What, 
may become for a moment. Where to Plant 
Shrubbery; and the response of the free-line gar- 
den will be, of course, ''Remember, concerning 
each separate shrub, that he or she — or it, if 
you really "prefer the neuter — is your guest, and 
plant him or her or it where it will best enjoy 
itself, while promoting the whole company's 
joy." Before it has arrived in the garden, 
therefore, learn — and carefully consider — its 
likes and dislikes, habits, manners and accom- 
plishments and its friendly or possibly un- 
friendly relations with your other guests. This 
done, determine between whom and whom you 
will seat it; between what and what you will 
plant it, that is, so as to "draw it out," as we 
say of diffident or reticent persons; or to use it 
for drawing out others of less social address. 
But how many a lovely shrub has arrived where 
it was urgently invited, and found that its host 
or hostess, or both, had actually forgotten its 

85 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

name ! Did not know how to introduce it to 
any fellow guest, or whether it loved sun or 
shade, loam, peat, clay, leaf-mould or sand, 
wetness or dryness; and yet should have found 
all that out in the proper blue-book (horticul- 
tural dictionary) before inviting the poor mor- 
tified guest at all. 

"Oh, pray be seated — anywhere. Plant 
yourself alone in the middle. This is Liberty 
Garden." 

''It is no such thing," says the tear-bedewed 
beauty to herself; "it's Anarchy Garden." Yet, 
like the lady she is, she stays where she is put, 
and gets along surprisingly well. 

New England calls Northampton one of her 
most beautiful towns. But its beauty lies in the 
natural landscape in and around it, in the rise, 
fall, and swing of the seat on which it sits, the 
graceful curving of its streets, the noble spread 
of its great elms and maples, the green and blue 
openness of grounds everywhere about its mod- 
est homes and its highly picturesque outlook 
upon distant hills and mountains and interven- 
ing meadows and fields, with the Connecticut 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

winding through. ^ Its architecture is in three or 
four instances admirable though not extraor- 
dinary, and, as in almost every town in our vast 
America, there are hardly five householders in 
it who are really skilled flower-gardeners, either 
professional or amateur. 

As the present century was coming in, how- 
ever, the opportunity, through private flower- 
gardening, to double or quadruple the town's 
beauty and to do it without great trouble or 
expense, yet with great individual delight and 
social pleasure, came to the lively notice of a 
number of us. It is, then, for the promotion of 
this object throughout all our bounds, and not 
for the perfection of the art for its own sake, 
that we maintain this competition and award 
these ''Carnegie" prizes. Hence certain fea- 
tures of our method the value and necessity of 
which might not be clear to the casual inquirer 
without this explanation. 

May I repeat it ^ Not to reward two or three 
persons yearly for reaching some dizzy peak 
of art unattainable by ordinary taste and skill, 
nor to reward one part of the town or one ele- 

87 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

ment of its people for gardening better than 
another, nor to promote the production of indi- 
vidual plants or flowers of extraordinary splen- 
dor, nor even to incite children to raise patches 
of flowers, is our design; but to make the modest 
and democratic art of Where to Plant What 
(an art, nevertheless, quite beyond the grasp of 
children) so well known and so valued that 
its practical adoption shall overrun the whole 
town. 

To this end we have divided our field into 
seven districts, in each of which the number of 
gardens is about the same. In each of these 
seven districts only three prizes (out of twenty- 
one) may be taken in any one season. Conse- 
quently three prizes must fall to each district 
every year. Yet the best garden of all still car- 
ries off the capital prize, the second-best may 
win the second, and cannot take a lower than 
the third, and the lowest awards go into the dis- 
trict showing the poorest results. Even this 
plan is so modified as further to stimulate those 
who strive against odds of location or conditions, 
for no district is allowed to receive two prizes 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

consecutive in the list. The second prize can- 
not be bestowed in the same district in which 
the first is being awarded, though the third can. 
The third cannot go into the same district as 
the second, though the fourth may. And so on 
to the twenty-first. Moreover, a garden show- 
ing much improvement over the previous season 
may take a prize, as against a better garden 
which shows no such improvement. Also no 
garden can take the capital prize twice nor ever 
take a prize not higher than it has taken before. 
The twenty-one prizes are for those who hire no 
help in their gardening; two others are for those 
who reserve the liberty to employ help, and still 
another two are exclusively for previous winners 
of the capital prize, competing among them- 
selves. In each of the five districts a committee 
of ladies visits the competing gardens, inspecting, 
advising, encouraging, sometimes learning more 
than they teach, and reporting to headquarters, 
the People's Institute. At these headquarters, 
on two acres of ground in the heart of the city, 
we have brought gradually into shape, on a plan 
furnished by Frederick Law Olmsted's Sons, 

89 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

Landscape Architects, of Boston (Brookline), a 
remarkably handsome garden of flowers and 
shrubbery designed as a model for the guidance 
of those in the competition who seek to combine 
artistic beauty with inexpensiveness. From time 
to time we have given at these headquarters 
winter courses of lectures on practical flower- 
gardening. 

As a result we have improved, and are still 
improving, the aspect of entire streets and are 
interesting the whole city. 

But to return to our discussion. Here is a 
short story of two ladies. They are not in our 
competition, though among its most ardent well- 
wishers. A friend had given one of them a bit of 
green, woody growth some two feet high and half 
an inch thick. She had a wee square bit of 
front grass-plot something larger than a table- 
cloth, but certainly not large enough for a game 
of marbles. In the centre of this bit of grass she 
planted her friend's gift. Then came our other 
lady, making a call, and with her best smile of 
humorous commendation, saying: 

"My dear, you have violated the first rule of 

90 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

gardening. You've planted your bush where 
you wanted it." 

The dehghted gardener went in the strength 
of that witticism for forty weeks or at least 
until some fiend of candor, a brother, like as 
not, said: 

"Yes, truly you have violated the first rule of 
gardening, for you have put your willow-tree — 
that's what it is — where a minute's real reflec- 
tion would have told you you'd wish you 
hadn't." 

Where to Plant What ! Plant it where you — 
and your friends — your friends of best gar- 
dening taste — will be glad you planted it when 
all your things are planted. Please those who 
know best, and so best please yourself. Never- 
theless, beware ! Watch yourself ! Do so spe- 
cially when you think you have mastered the 
whole art. Watch even those who indisputably 
know better than you do, for everybody makes 
mistakes which he never would have dreamed 
he could make. Only the other day I heard 
an amateur say to a distinguished professional 
gardener: 

91 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

"Did you plant those shrubs of gorgeous 
flower and broad, dark leaf out on your street 
front purely as a matter of artistic taste ?" 

"I did/' he replied. "I wanted to put my 
best foot foremost. Wouldn't you ? " 

''Why should I.?" asked the amateur. "I 
wouldn't begin a song with my highest note, nor 
a game with my strongest card, nor an address 
with my most impassioned declaration, nor a 
sonnet with its most pregnant line. If I should, 
where were my climax.^" 

Certainly the amateur had the best of it. A 
garden is a discourse. A garden is a play. See 
with what care both the dramatist and the stage- 
manager avoid putting the best foot foremost. 
See how warily they hold back the supreme 
strength of the four or five act piece for the 
last act but one. There is a charmingly instruct- 
ive analogy between a garden and a drama. In 
each you have preparation, progress, climax, and 
close. And then, also, in each you must have 
your lesser climaxes leading masterfully up to 
the supreme one, and a final quiet one to let 
gratefully down from the giddy height. 

92 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

In Northampton nearly all of our hundreds of 
gardens contesting for prizes are plays of only 
one or two acts. I mean they have only one or 
two buildings to garden up to and between and 
around and away from. Yet it is among these 
one-act plays, these one-house gardens, that I 
find the art truth most gracefully emphasized, 
that the best foot should not go foremost. In a 
large garden a false start may be atoned for by 
better art farther on and in; but in a small gar- 
den, for mere want of room and the chance to 
forget, a bad start spoils all. No, be the garden 
a prince's or a cottager's, the climaxes to be 
got by superiority of stature, by darkness and 
breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom 
belong at its far end. Even in the one-house 
garden I should like to see the climaxes plural 
to the extent of two; one immediately at the back 
of the house, the other at the extreme rear of 
the ground. At the far end of the lot I would 
have the final storm of passion and riot of dis- 
closure, and then close about the rear of the 
house there should be the things of supreme rich- 
ness, exquisiteness and rarity. 

93 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

This soft- voiced echo answering back out of 
the inmost heart of the whole demesne gives 
genuineness of sentiment to the entire scheme. 
To plant a conflagration of color against the back 
fence and stop there would be worse than melo- 
dramatic. It would be to close the play with a 
bang, and even a worthy one-act play does not 
close with a bang. The back of the lot is not 
the absolute end of the garden-play. Like the 
stage-play, the garden-play brings its beholder 
back at the very last, by a sweet reversion, to 
the point from which it started. The true gar- 
den-lover gardens not mainly for the passer-by, 
but rather for himself and the friends who come 
to see him. Even when he treads his garden 
paths alone he is a pleased and welcome visitor to 
himself, and shows his garden to himself as to a 
visitor. Hence there is always at last a turning 
back to the house or to the front entrance, and 
this is the play's final Hues, the last grouping of 
the players, the relief of all tension and the 
descent of the curtain. 

One point farther in this direction and we may 
give our hard-worked analogy a respite. It is 

94 




"... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and breadth 
of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end." 

Everything in this photograph was planted by the amateur gardener except the pine-trees in 

perspective. 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

this : as those who make and present a play take 
great pains that, by flashes of revelation to eye 
and to ear, the secrets most unguessed by the 
characters in the piece shall be early revealed to 
the audience and persistently pressed upon its 
attention, so should the planting of a garden 
be; that, as if quite without the gardener's or 
the garden's knowledge, always, to the eye, nos- 
tril or ear, some clear disclosure of charm still 
remote may beckon and lure across easy and 
tempting distances from nook to nook of the 
small garden, or from alley to alley and from 
glade to glade of the large one. Where to 
Plant What ? Plant it as far away as, according 
to the force of its character or the splendor of its 
charms, it can stand and beckon back with best 
advantage for the whole garden. 

Thus we generalize. And as long as one may 
generalize he is comparatively safe from humil- 
iating criticism. It is only when he begins to 
name things by name and say what is best for 
just where, that he touches the naked eyeball (or 
the funny-bone) of others whose crotchets are not 
identical with his. Yet in Northampton this 

95 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

is what we have to do, and since the competitors 
for our prizes always have the Where before they 
are moved to get and place the What, we find 
our where-and-what problem easiest to handle 
when we lift it, so to speak, by the tail. Then 
it is "What to Plant Where," and for answer 
we have made a short list of familiar flowering 
shrubs best suited to our immediate geographical 
locality. We name only fourteen and we so 
describe each as to indicate clearly enough, with- 
out dictating, whereabouts to put it. We begin : 
"Azalea. Our common wild azalea is the 
flowering bush best known as 'swamp honey- 
suckle.' The two azaleas listed here, A. mollis 
and the Ghent varieties, are of large, beautiful 
and luxuriant bloom, and except the 'swamp 
honeysuckle' are the only azaleas hardy in 
western Massachusetts. Mollis is from two to 
six feet high, three to six feet broad, and blooms 
in April and May. Its blossoms are yellow, 
orange or pink, single or double. Its soil may 
be sandy or peaty, and moist, but any good gar- 
den soil will serve; its position partly shaded or 
in full sunlight. The Ghents are somewhat 

96 






ni 



• ..A^Sip 


^ 


'imW4''^ 


.-'^M* 




? 4^"^ 


f!^ ■,■ f '" ^, " .. 


'• 


'::4-^6>'- 


' 



'^fe-"St' 



"'■^**^ii»ft% 



-■«*!- -«%. 



"Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure." 

From a photograph taken on My Own Acre, showing how I pulled the lawn in under the 
trees The big chestnuts in the middle are on the old fence line that stood on the very 
edge of the precipitously falling ground. All the ground in sight in the picture is a till. 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

taller and not so broad in proportion. They 
bloom from May to July, and their blossoms are 
white, yellow, orange, pink, carmine, or red, 
single or double. Soil and position about the 
same as for mollis. 

"Berberis. Berberis is the barberry, so well 
known by its beautiful pendent berries. It is 
one of the best shrubs to use where a thorny 
bush is wanted. B, vulgaris, the common sort, 
and one of the most beautiful, grows from four 
to eight feet high, with a breadth of from three 
to six feet. 5. Thunhergii, or Thunberg's bar- 
berry, is the well-known Japanese variety, a 
dense, drooping bush from two to four feet 
high and somewhat greater breadth. Its pale- 
yellow blossoms come in April and May, and 
its small, slender, bright-red berries remain on 
the spray until spring. A dry soil is the best for 
it, though it will grow in any, and needs httle 
shade or none. B, purpurea is a variety of vul- 
garis and is as handsome as the common. It 
answers to the same description, except that its 
foliage is purple, which makes it very tempting 
to new gardeners, but very hard to relate in good 

97 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

artistic taste among the other shrubs of the gar- 
den. Few small gardens can make good use of 
purple foliage. 

''Deutzia gracilis. The gracilis is one of the 
most beautiful of all the deutzias. Its delicate 
foliage of rather light green, its snowy flowers 
and its somewhat bending form, make it one of 
the fairest ornaments of the home grounds. Its 
height is three feet, its breadth from two to four 
feet. It blooms in May and June. Its soil may 
be any well-drained sort, and its position any 
slightly sheltered aspect." 

So we hurry down the alphabet. The list is 
short for several good reasons, one being that 
it is well to give other Hsts from season to sea- 
son. No doubt our inaccuracies would distress a 
botanist or scientific gardener, but we convey 
the information, such as it is, to our fellow 
citizens, and they use it. In the last ten years 
we have furnished to our amateurs thousands of 
shrubs and plants, at the same reduced rates for 
a few specimens each which we pay for them by 
the hundred. 

But of the really good sorts are there shrubs 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

enough, you ask, to afford new lists year after 
year ? Well, for the campus of a certain prepara- 
tory school for boys, with the planting of which 
the present writer had somewhat to do a few 
years ago, the list of shrubs set round the bases 
of four large buildings and several hundred 
yards of fence numbered seventy-five kinds. 
To end the chapter, let us say something about 
that operation. On a pictorial page or two we 
give ourselves the pleasure of showing the results 
of this undertaking; but first, both by pictures 
and by verbal description let me show where we 
planted what. Of course we made sundry mis- 
takes. Each thing we did may be vulnerable to 
criticism, and our own largest hope is that our 
results may not fall entirely beneath that sort 
of compliment. 

This campus covers some five acres in the 
midst of a small town. Along three of its 
boundaries old maples and elms, in ordinary 
single-file shade-tree lines, tower and spread. 
On the fourth line, the rear bound, a board fence 
divides the ground from the very unattractive 
back yards, stables and sheds of a number of 

99 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

town residents. The front lies along the main 
street of the place, facing the usual "shop-row." 
The entire area has nearly always been grassed. 
Not what an Enghshman would call so, but 
turfed in a stuttering fashion, impetuous and 
abashed by turns, and very easy to keep off; 
most rank up against the granite underpinnings 
of the buildings, and managing somehow to 
writhe to all the fences, of which those on the 
street fronts are of iron. Parallel with the front 
fence and some fifty feet behind it, three of the 
institution's buildings stand abreast and about 
a hundred feet apart. All three are tall, rect- 
angular three-story piles of old red brick, on 
granite foundations, and full of windows all of 
one size, pigeon-house style. The middle one 
has a fairly good Greek-pillared porch, of wood, 
on the middle half of its front. 

Among these buildings we began our planting. 
We had drawn, of course, a ground plan of the 
whole place, to scale, showing each ground-floor 
door and window, so that we might respect its 
customary or projected use. A great point, that, 
in Where to Plant What. I once heard of a 

100 




1^. 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

school whose small boys were accused of wan- 
tonly trampling down some newly set shrubs on 
the playground. ''Well," demanded one brave 
urchin, "what made 'em go and plant a lot of 
bushes right on first base?" And no one was 
ready with an answer, for there is something 
morally wrong about any garden that will rob a 
boy of his rights. 

With this ground plan before us we decided 
indoors where to plant what outdoors and cal- 
culated arithmetically the number of each sort of 
shrub we should need for the particular interval 
we designed that sort to fill. Our scheme of ar- 
rangement was a crescendo of foliage and flower 
effects, beginning on the fronts of the buildings 
and rising toward their rears, while at all points 
making more of foliage than of bloom, because 
the bloom shows for only a month or less, while 
the leaf remains for seven or more. Beginning 
thus with our quietest note, the interest of any 
one looking in, or coming in, from the public 
front is steadily quickened and progressively re- 
warded, while the crowning effects at the rear 
of the buildings are reserved for the crowning 

101 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN' 

moment when the visitor may be said to be fully 
received. On the other hand, if the approach is 
a returning one from the rear of the entire 
campus, — where stands the institution's only 
other building, a large tall-towered gymnasium, 
also of red brick, — these superlative effects 
show out across an open grassy distance of from 
two hundred to three hundred feet. 

Wherefore — and here at last we venture to 
bring names of things and their places together 
— at the fronts of the northernmost and south- 
ernmost of these three "Halls" we set favorite 
varieties of white-flowering spireas {Thunbergia, 
sorbifolia,arguta,Van Houttei), the pearl-bush (ex- 
ochorda), pink diervillas, and flowering-almonds. 
After these, on the southern side of the south- 
ernmost building, for example, followed lilacs, 
white and purple, against the masonry, — the 
white against the red brick, the lilac tint 
well away from it, — with tamarisk and kerria 
outside, abreast of them, and then pink and red 
spireas {Bumaldi and its dwarf variety, An- 
thony Waterer). On the other side of the same 
house we set deutzias (scabra against the brick- 

102 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

work and Lemoynei and gracilis outside). In a 
wing corner, where melting snows crash down 
from a roof -valley, we placed the purple-flowered 
Lespedeza penduliflorum, which each year dies 
to the ground before the snow-slides come, yet 
each September blooms from three to four feet 
high in drooping profusion. Then from that 
angle to the rear corner we put in a mass of 
pink wild roses. Lastly, on the tall, doorless, 
windowless rear end, we planted the crimson- 
rambler rose, and under it a good hundred of 
the red rugosas. 

In the arrangement of these plantings we 
found ourselves called upon to deal with a very 
attractive and, to us, new phase of our question. 
The rising progression from front to rear was a 
matter of course, but how about the progression 
at right angles to it; from building to build- 
ing, that is, of these three so nearly alike in 
size and dignity ? To the passer-by along their 
Main Street front — the admiring passer-by, as 
we hope — should there be no augmentation of 
charm in the direction of his steps .^ And if 
there should be, then where and how ought it to 

103 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

show forth so as to avoid an anticKmax to one 
passing along the same front from the opposite 
direction ? We promptly saw, — as the reader 
sees, no doubt, before we can tell it, — that what 
we wanted was two crescendos meeting some- 
where near the middle; a crescendo passing into 
a diminuendo from whichever end you moved 
to the other — a swell. We saw that our loud- 
pedal effect should come upon ''Middle Hall." 
So there, on its lucky bit of Greek porch, we 
bestowed the purple wistaria for spring, and for 
late summer that fragrant snowdrift, the clema- 
tis paniculata, so adapted as to festoon and 
chaplet, but never to smother, the Greek col- 
umns. On one of this structure's sides we 
planted forsythia, backed closer against the 
masonry by althaeas, with the low and ex- 
quisite mahonia (holly-leafed barberry) under 
its outer spread. On the other side of the house 
we placed, first, loniceras (bush honeysuckles); 
next, azaleas, in variety and profusion; then, 
toward the rear end, a mass of hardy hydrangeas 
{Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora) , and at the 
very back of the pile another mass, of the flower- 

104 



WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 

ing-quince (Pyrus japonica), with the trumpet- 
creeper {Tecoma radicans), to cHmb out of it. 

About ''North Hall," the third building, we 
planted more quietly, and most quietly on its 
outer, its northern, side where our lateral 
"swell" (rising efiPect) begins, or ends, accord- 
ing to the direction of your going, beginning 
with that modest but pretty bloomer the Ligus- 
trum ibota, a perfectly hardy privet more grace- 
ful than the California {ovalifolium) species, 
which really has Uttle business in icy New Eng- 
land away from the seashore. 

I might have remarked before that nearly all 
the walls of these three buildings, as well as the 
gymnasium on the far side of the campus, were 
already adorned with the "Boston ivy" {Am- 
pelopsis Veitchii), With the plantings thus de- 
scribed, and with the gymnasium surrounded 
by yet stronger greenery; with the back fence 
masked by willows, elders and red-stemmed 
cornus; and with a number of haphazard foot- 
paths reduced to an equally convenient and far 
more graceful few, our scheme stands complete 
in its first, but only, please notice, its first, phase. 

105 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

The picture is submitted to your imagination 
not as it looked the day we ceased planting, but 
as we expected it to appear after a season or 
two, and as it does look now. 

At present, rather tardily, we have begun 
to introduce herbaceous flowering perennials, 
which we ignored in the first part of our plan, 
because herbaceous plants are the flesh and 
blood and garments of a complete living and 
breathing garden; the walls, shrubs, trees, walks 
and drives are its bones. When this secondary 
phase has been more fully realized and we have 
placed bush-clumps and tree-clumps out on the 
open campus, and when our hundreds of cottage 
gardens are shaking off the prison irons of frost, 
we hope, if you cannot do us the honor to be 
with us bodily, your spirit may be near, aiding 
us on in the conquest of this ever beautiful 
Where-to-Plant-What problem, which I believe 
would make us a finer and happier nation if it 
could be expanded to national proportions. 



106 



THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF 
NORTHAMPTON 



THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF 
NORTHAMPTON 

ADAM and Eve, it is generally conceded, 
-^ ^ were precocious. They entered into the 
cares and joys of adult life at an earlier age than 
any later human prodigy. We call them the 
grand old gardener and his wife, but, in fact, 
they were the youngest gardeners the world has 
ever seen, and they really did not give entire 
satisfaction. How could they without tools ? 

Let it pass. The whole allusion is prompted 
only by the thought that youth does not spon- 
taneously garden. If it was actually necessary 
that our first parents should begin life as gar- 
deners, that fully explains why they had to begin 
it also as adults. Youth enjoys the garden, 
yes ! but not its making or tending. Childhood, 
the abecedarian, may love to plant seeds, to 
watch them spring, grow, and flower, and to 
help them do so; but that is the merest a-b-c of 

109 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

gardening, and no more makes him an ama- 
teur in the art than spelUng words of one letter 
makes him a poet. One may raise or love 
flowers for a lifetime, yet never in any art sense 
become a gardener. 

In front of the main building of a pubhe in- 
stitution which we must presently mention again 
there is a sloping strip of sward a hundred feet 
long and some fifteen wide. A florist of fully half 
a century's experience one day halted beside it 
and exclaimed to the present writer, ''Only say 
the word, and I'll set out the 'ole len'th o' that 
strip in foUage-plants a-spellin' o' the name: 
'People's Hinstitute ! ' " Yet that gentle en- 
thusiast advertised himself as a landscape- 
gardener and got clients. For who was there to 
tell them or him that he was not one ? 

Not only must we confess that youth does not 
spontaneously garden, but that our whole Amer- 
ican civilization is still so lingeringly in its non- 
gardening youth that only now and then, here 
and there, does it reahze that a florist, whether 
professional or amateur, or even a nurseryman, 
is not necessarily a constructive gardener, or 

110 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

that artistic gardening, however informal, is 
nine-tenths constructive. 

Yet particularly because such gardening is so, 
and because some of its finest rewards are so 
slow-coming and long-abiding, there is no stage 
of life in which it is so reasonable for man or 
woman to love and practise the art as when 
youth is in its first full stature and may garden 
for itself and not merely for posterity. "John," 
said his aged father to one of our hving poets, 
"I know now how to transplant full-grown trees 
successfully. Do it a long time ago." Let the 
striphng plant the sapling. 

Youth, however, and especially our American 
youth, has his or her excuses, such as they are. 
Of the garden or the place to be gardened, "It's 
not mine," he or she warmly says; "it's only my 
father's," or "my mother's." 

Young man! Young maiden! True, the 
place, so pathetically begging to be gardened, 
may not be your future home, may never be 
your property, and it is right enough that a 
feeling for ownership should begin to shape your 
daily life. But let it not misshape it. You 

111 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

know that ownership is not all of life nor the 
better half of it, and it is quite as good for you 
to give the fact due recognition by gardening 
early in life as it was for Adam and Eve. 

It is better, for you can do so in a much more 
fortunate manner, having tools and the first 
pair's warning example. It is better also be- 
cause you can do what to them was impossible; 
you can make gardening a concerted public 
movement. 

That is what we have made it in Northamp- 
ton, Massachusetts, whose curving streets and 
ancient elms you may have heard of as making 
it very garden-like in its mere layout; many of 
whose windows, piazzas, and hillside lawns look 
oflP across the beautiful Connecticut, winding 
broadly among its farmed meadows and vanish- 
ing southward through the towering gateway 
made for or by it millenniums ago between 
Mounts Tom and Holyoke. 

There Smith College is, as well as that "Peo- 
ple's Institute" aforementioned, and it is through 
that institute, one of whose several branches of 
work is carried on wholly by Smith College stu- 

112 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

dents, that we, the Northampton townspeople, 
established and maintain another branch, our 
concerted gardening. 

One evening in September a company of 
several hundred persons gathered in the main 
hall of the institute's "Carnegie House" to wit- 
ness and receive the prize awards of their twelfth 
annual flower-garden competition. 

The place was filled. A strong majority of 
those present were men and women who earn 
their daily bread with their hands. The whole 
population of Northampton is but twenty thou- 
sand or so, and the entire number of its voters 
hardly exceeds four thousand, yet there were one 
thousand and thirteen gardens in the competi- 
tion, the gardens of that many homes; and 
although children had taken part in the care of 
many of them, and now were present to see 
the prizes go to their winners, not one was sepa- 
rately a child's garden. By a rule of the con- 
test, each garden had been required to comprise 
the entire home lot, with the dwelling for its 
dominating feature and the family its spiritual 
unit. 

113 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

The ceremony of award began with the lowest 
cash prize and moved steadily up to the second 
and first, these two being accompanied by bril- 
liantly illuminated diplomas, and as each award 
was bestowed, the whole gathering of winners 
and non-winners — for no one could be called 
a loser — sounded their congratulations by a 
hearty clapping of hands. They had made the 
matter a public, concerted movement, and were 
interested in its results and rewards as spiritual 
proprietors in a common possession much wider 
than mere personal ownership under the law. 

This wider sentiment of community, so valu- 
able to the whole public interest, was further 
promoted by the combining of nearly two hun- 
dred of these same gardens in "neighborhood 
garden clubs" of seven or more gardens each, 
every garden in each club directly adjoining an- 
other, and the clubs competing for prizes of so 
much a garden to the best and second-best clubs. 

Yet none the less for all this, but much more, a 
great majority of the multitude of home garden- 
ers represented by this gathering were enjoying 
also — each home pair through their own home 

114 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

garden — the pleasures of personal ownership 
and achievement. 

Many of the prize-winners were young, but 
many were gray, and some were even aged, yet 
all alike would have testified that even for age, 
and so all the more for youth, artistic flower- 
gardening is as self -rewarding a form of unselfish 
work and as promptly rewarding a mode of wait- 
ing on the future as can easily be found; that 
there is no more beautifully rewarding way by 
which youth may 

" Learn to labor and to wait." 

Maybe that is why Adam and Eve were appren- 
ticed to it so very young. 

It should have been said before that in advance 
of the award of prizes some very pleasant music 
and song were given from the platform by a few 
Smith College girls, and that then the company 
were shown stereopticon pictures of a number of 
their own gardens as they looked during the past 
summer and as they had looked when, a few 
years ago, — although seemingly but yesterday, 
— their owners began to plan and to plant. 

115 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

The contrasts were amazing and lent great 
emphasis to the two or three truths we have 
here dwelt on probably long enough. To wit: 
first, that, as a rule, all true gardeners are grown- 
ups; second, that therein lies the finest value of 
concerted gardening; third, that the younger 
the grown-up the better, for the very reason 
that the crowning recompenses of true gardening 
come surely, but come late; and fourth, that, 
nevertheless, gardening yields a lovely ampli- 
tude of immediate rewards. 

For instance, this gathering in our People's 
Institute also, before the announcement of prizes, 
took delight in hearing reported the aggregate 
of the flowers, mostly of that season's planting, 
distributed by a considerable number of the 
competitors to the shut-in and the bereaved. 
This feature of the movement had been begun 
only the previous year, and its total was no more 
than some three thousand dozens of flowers; but 
many grateful acknowledgments, both verbal 
and written, prove that it gave solace and joy 
to many hearts and we may call it a good 
beginning. 

116 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

A garden should be owned not to be monopo- 
lized, but to be shared, as a song is owned not 
to be hushed, but to be sung; and the wide giving 
of its flowers is but one of several ways in which 
a garden may sing or be sung — for the garden 
is both song and singer. At any rate it cannot 
help but be a public benefaction and a public 
asset, if only its art be true. 

Hence one of the values of our gardening in 
Northampton : making the gardens so many and 
so artistically true and good, it makes the town, 
as a whole, more interesting and pleasing to 
itself, and in corresponding degree the better 
to live in. Possibly there may be some further 
value in telling here how we do it. 

As soon as signs of spring are plain to the gen- 
eral eye the visiting for enrolment begins. A 
secretary of the institute sets out to canvass such 
quarters of the field as have not been appor- 
tioned among themselves individually by the 
ladies composing the committee of "volunteer 
garden visitors." At the same time these ladies 
begin their calls, some undertaking more, some 
less, according to each one's wilhngness or abihty . 

117 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

This first round consists merely in enrolling 
the competitors by name, street, and number 
and in sending these registrations in to the in- 
stitute. Later, by the same ladies, the same 
ground is more or less gone over again in visits 
of observation, inquiry and counsel, and once 
a month throughout the season the ladies meet 
together with the president of the institute to 
report the conditions and sentiments encoun- 
tered and to plan further work. 

The importance of these calls is not confined 
to the advancement of good gardening. They 
promote fellowship among neighbors and kind 
feeling between widely parted elements of so- 
ciety. Last year this committee made nearly 
eleven hundred such visits. 

Meanwhile a circular letter has been early 
mailed to the previous year's competitors, urging 
them to re-enroll by post-card. Last year hun- 
dreds did so. Meanwhile, too, as soon as the 
enrolment is completed, the institute's general 
secretary begins a tour of official inspection, and 
as he is an experienced teacher of his art, his in- 
spections are expert. His errand is known by 

118 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

the time he is in sight, and, as a rule, the house- 
holder joins him in a circuit of the place, show- 
ing achievements, reciting difficulties and dis- 
appointments, confessing errors, and taking tact- 
ful advice. 

And what room he finds for tact ! He sees a 
grave-like bed of verbenas defacing the middle 
of a small greensward — a dab of rouge on a 
young cheek; a pert child doing all the talking. 
Whereupon he shrewdly pleads not for the 
sward but for the flowers, ''You have those there 
to show oflF at their best?" 

"Yes. Don't they do it.?" 

"Not quite." He looks again. "Nine feet 
long — five wide. If you'll plant them next 
year in a foot-wide ribbon under that border of 
stronger things along your side boundary they'll 
give you at least forty feet of color instead of 
nine, and they'll illuminate your bit of sward 
instead of eclipsing it." 

In another garden he says, "Splendid sun- 
burst of color, that big tub of geraniums !" and 
the householder is pleased to admit the fact. 
"If you'd sink the tub into the ground clear down 

119 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

to the rim they'd take up no more room and 
they'd look natural. Besides, you wouldn't 
have to water them continually." 

"That's true!" says the householder, quite 
in the incredible way of an old-fashioned book. 
"I'll do it!" 

"And then," says the caller, "if you will set 
it away off on that far corner of the lawn it 
will shine clear across, showing everything be- 
tween here and there, like a lighthouse across a 
harbor, or like a mirror, which you hang not in 
your parlor door, but at the far end of the room." 

"When you come back you shall see it there," 
is the reply. 

Sometimes, yet not often, a contestant is met 
who does not want advice, and who can hardly 
hide his scorn for book statements and experts. 
The present writer came upon one last year 
who "could not see what beauty there was in 
John Smith's garden, yet we had given him and 
his wife the capital prize !" 

Frequently one finds the house of a com- 
petitor fast locked and dumb, its occupants 
being at work in some mill or shop. Then if the 

120 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

visit is one of oflScial inspection a card stating 
that fact and dated and signed on the spot is 
left under the door, and on its reverse side the 
returning householder finds printed the fol- 
lowing: 

"In marking for merit your whole place is 
considered your garden. It is marked on four 
points: (1) Its layout, or ground plan; (2) its 
harmonies — of arrangement as to color of 
blooms and as to form and size of trees, shrubs 
and plants; (3) its condition — as to the neatness 
and order of everything; and (4) its duration — 
from how early in the year to how late it will 
make a pleasing show. 

"Mow your lawn as often as the mower will 
cut the grass, but also keep it thoroughly weeded. 
As a rule, in laying out your plantings avoid 
straight lines and hard angles; the double curve, 
or wave line, is the line of grace. Plant all the 
flowers you wish, few or many, but set shrubs 
at their back to give stronger and more lasting 
effects when the flowers are out of season as well 
as while they are in bloom. 

"Try to plant so as to make your whole place 
121 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

one single picture of a home, with the house 
the chief element and the boundary-lines of the 
lot the frame. Plant on all your lot's bound- 
aries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its 
buildings; but between these plantings keep the 
space grassed only, and open. In these house 
and boundary borders let your chief plantings 
be shrubs, and so have a nine months' instead of 
a three months' garden." 

The secretary's tour completed and his score 
of all the gardens tabulated, a list is drawn 
from it of the one hundred and fifty best gar- 
dens, and a second circuit of counsel and in- 
spection, limited to this greatly reduced number, 
is made by the president of the institute, who 
marks them again on the same four points of 
merit. 

These two markings, averaged, determine the 
standing of all prize-winning gardens except the 
leading four. Then the president calls in one 
professional and one amateur expert, visits with 
them as many of the most promising contestants 
as can be seen in an afternoon's drive, and with 
them decides the award of the four highest prizes. 

122 






"Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its 

buildings." 

A secluded back corner of a prize-winner's garden which shows how slight a planting may 
redeem the homeliness of an old fence. 




"Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its 

widest and most general dissemination." 
A cheap apartment row whose landlord had its planting done by the People's Institute. 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

That is all. When we have given two or 
three lesser items our story is told — for what it 
is worth. It is well to say we began small; in 
our first season, fifteen years ago, our whole roll 
of competitors numbered but sixty. It is the 
visiting that makes the difference; last season 
these visits, volunteer and official, were more 
than thirty-one hundred. 

Another source of our success we believe to be 
the fact that our prizes are many and the leading 
ones large — fifteen, twelve, nine dollars, and so 
on down. Prizes and all, the whole movement 
costs a yearly cash outlay of less than three hun- 
dred dollars; without the People's Institute at 
its back it could still be done for five hundred. 

And now, this being told in the hope that it 
may incite others, and especially youth, to make 
experiments Hke it elsewhere, to what impulse 
shall we appeal ? 

Will it not suffice if we invoke that adolescent 
instinct which moves us to merge our individual 
life — to consolidate it, as the stock-manipulators 
say — in the world's one great life, our "celes- 
tial selfishness" being intuitively assured that 

123 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

our own priceless individuality will gain, not 
lose, thereby ? 

Or shall we make our plea to an "art im- 
pulse"? No? Is the world already artificial 
enough? Not by haK, although it is full, 
crammed, with the things the long-vanished 
dead have done for it in every art, from cameos 
to shade-trees; done for it because it was al- 
ready so fair that, live long or die soon, they 
could not hold themselves back from making it 
fairer. 

Yet, all that aside, is not this concerted gar- 
dening precisely such a work that young man- 
hood and womanhood, however artificial or un- 
artificial, anywhere, everywhere. Old World or 
newest frontier, ought to take to naturally? 
Adam and Eve did, and they — but we have 
squeezed Adam and Eve dry enough. 

Patriotism ! Can you imagine a young man 
or woman without it? And if you are young 
and a lover of your country, do you not love 
its physical aspects, "'its rocks and rills, its 
woods and templed hills"? And if so, do you 
love only those parts of it which you never see 

124 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

and the appearance of which you have no power 
to modify? Or do you love the land only and 
not the people, the nation, the government? 
Or, loving these, have you no love for the near- 
est public fraction of it, your own town and 
neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars 
and Stripes is the flattest, silliest idolatry; so 
flat and silly it is hardly worth chiding. Your 
patriotism is a patriotism for war only, and a 
country with only that kind is never long with- 
out war. 

You see the difference? Patriotism for war 
generalizes. A patriotism for peace particu- 
larizes, locaUzes. Ah, you do love, despite all 
their faults, your nation, your government, your 
town and townspeople, else you would not so 
often scold them! Otherwise, why do you let 
us call them yours? Because they belong to 
you? No, because you belong to them. Be- 
yond cavil you are your own, but beyond cavil, 
too, you are theirs; their purchased possession, 
paid for long, long in advance and sight-unseen. 

You cannot use a sidewalk, a street-lamp, or 
a post-box, or slip away into the woods and find 

125 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

them cleared of savages and deadly serpents, 
without seeing part of the price paid for you 
before your great-grandfather was born. So, 
then, loving your town enough to scold it, you 
will also serve it ! 

Now this we say not so much to be preaching 
as to bring in a last word descriptive of our 
Northampton movement. We do not make 
that work a mere aggregation of private kind- 
nesses, but a public business for the promotion 
of the town in sanitary upkeep, beauty and civic 
fellowship. 

And so our aim is not chiefly to reward the 
highest art in gardening, but to procure its 
widest and most general dissemination. The 
individual is definitely subordinated to the com- 
munity's undivided interest. Since gardening 
tends to develop in fortunate sections and to die 
out in others, we have laid off our town map in 
seven parts and made a rule that to each of 
these shall go three of the prizes. 

Moreover, no two consecutive prizes can be 
awarded in any one of these districts. Where 
a competitor takes the capital prize no other 

126 



COTTAGE GARDENS 

can take a higher than the third, and if two in 
one district win the first and third prizes no 
one else there can take a higher than the fifth. 
So on through to prize twenty-one. 

Still further, a garden taking any of these 
prizes can never again take any of them but a 
higher one, and those who attain to the capital 
prize are thenceforth hors concours except to 
strive for the "Past Competitors' Prizes," first 
and second. 

Thus the seasons come and go, the gardens 
wake, rise, rejoice and slumber again; and 
because this arrangement is so evidently for 
the common weal and fellowship first, and yet 
leaves personal ownership all its liberties, rights 
and delights, it is cordially accepted of the 
whole people. And, lastly, as a certain dear 
lady whom we may not more closely specify 
exclaimed when, to her glad surprise, she easily 
turned the ceremonial golden key which first 
unlocked the Carnegie House of our People's 
Institute, "It works!" 



127 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S 
PUBLIC VALUE 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S 
PUBLIC VALUE 

WHAT its pages are to a book, a town's pri- 
vate households are to a town. 

No true home, standing soKtarily apart from 
the town (unbound, as it were) could be the 
blessed thing it is were there not so many other 
houses not standing apart but gathered into 
villages, towns and cities. 

Whence comes civilization but from civitas, the 
city ? And where did civitas get its name, when 
city and state were one, but from citizen ? He 
is not named for the city but the city for him, 
and his title meant first the head of a house- 
hold, the master of a home. To make a civili- 
zation, great numbers of men must have homes, 
must mass them compactly together and must 
not mass them together on a dead level of equal 
material equipment but in a confederation of 
homes of all ranks and conditions. 

131 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

The home is the cornerstone of the state. 

The town, the organized assemblage of homes, 
is the keystone of civiHzation's arch. 

In order to keep our whole civilization moving 
on and up, which is the only way for home and 
town to pay to each other their endless spiral of 
reciprocal indebtedness, every home in a town — 
or state, for that matter — should be made as 
truly and fully a home as every wise effort and 
kind influence of all the other homes can make 
it. Unless it takes part in this effort and influ- 
ence, no home, be it ever so favored, can realize, 
even for itself and in itself, the finest civiliza- 
tion it might attain. Why should it.^ I be- 
lieve this is a moral duty, a debt as real as 
taxes and very much like them. 

In our People's Institute over in Northamp- 
ton, Massachusetts, this is the a-b-c of all they 
seek to do: the individual tutoring, by college 
girls and town residents, of hundreds of young 
working men and women in whatever these may 
choose from among a score or so of light studies 
calculated to refine their aspirations ; the training 
of young girls, by paid experts, in the arts of the 

132 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

home, from cooking to embroidery; the training 
of both sexes in all the social amenities; and the 
enlistment of more than a thousand cottage 
homes in a yearly prize competition. 

It is particularly of this happy garden contest 
that I wish to say a word or two more. In 1914 
it completed its sixteenth season, but it is modelled 
on a much older one in the town of Dunfermline, 
Scotland, the birthplace of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, 
and it is from the bountiful spirit of that great 
citizen of two lands that both affairs draw at 
least one vital element of their existence. 

We in Northampton first learned of the Dun- 
fermline movement in 1898. We saw at once 
how strongly such a scheme might promote the 
general spiritual enrichment of our working peo- 
ple's homes if made one of the functions of our 
home-culture clubs, several features of whose 
work were already from five to ten years old. 
We proceeded to adopt and adapt the plan, and 
had our first competition and award of prizes in 
1898-99. 

Like Dunfermline, we made our prizes large, 
and to this we attribute no small part of our 

133 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

success. When we saw fit to increase their 
number we increased the total outlay as well, 
and at present we award twenty-one prizes a 
year, the highest being fifteen dollars, and one 
hundred dollars the sum of the whole twenty-one 
prizes. So we have gained one of our main pur- 
poses: to tempt into the contest the man of the 
house and thus to stimulate in him that care and 
pride of his home, the decHne of which, in the 
man of the house, is one of the costliest losses of 
hard living. 

One day on their round of inspection our 
garden judges came to a small house at the edge 
of the town, near the top of a hill through which 
the rustic street cuts its way some twelve or fif- 
teen feet below. The air was pure, the sur- 
roundings green, the prospect wide and lovely. 
Here was a rare chance for picturesque garden- 
ing. Although the yard was without a fence 
there had been some planting of flowers in it. 
Yet it could hardly be called a garden. So desti- 
tute was it of any intelligent plan and so un- 
cared for that it seemed almost to have a con- 
scious, awkward seK-contempt. In the flecked 

134 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

shade of a rude trellis of grapes that sheltered 
a side door two children of the household fell to 
work with great parade at a small machine, set- 
ting bristles into tooth-brushes for a neighboring 
factory, but it was amusingly plain that their 
labor was spasmodic and capricious. 

The mother was away on a business errand. 
The father was present. He had done his day's 
stint in the cutlery works very early, and with 
five hours of sunlight yet before him had no use 
to make of them but to sit on a bowlder on the 
crest of the pleasant hill and smoke and whittle. 
Had he been mentally trained he might, without 
leaving that stone, have turned those hours into 
real living, communing with nature and his 
own mind; but he had, as half an eye could see, 
no developed powers of observation, reflection 
or imagination, and probably, for sheer want of 
practice, could not have fixed his attention on a 
worthy book through five of its pages. The 
question that arose in the minds of his visitors 
comes again here: what could have been so good 
to keep idleness from breeding its swarm of evils 
in his brain and hands — and home — as for 

135 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

somebody, something, somehow, to put it into 
his head — well — for example — to make a 
garden? A garden, we will say, that should 
win a prize, and — even though it failed to win 
— should render him and his house and house- 
hold more interesting to himself, his neighbors 
and his town. 

He and his house seemed to be keeping the 
Ten Commandments in a slouching sort of 
way and we may even suppose they were out of 
debt — money debt; yet already they were an 
unconscious menace to society; their wage- 
earning powers had outgrown their wants. Out- 
grown them not because the wages were too high 
but because their wants were too low; were only 
wants of the body, wants of the barrenest uncul- 
ture; the inelastic wants. 

That is "my own invention," that phrase! 
The bodily wants of a reptile are elastic. If an 
alligator or a boa-constrictor catches a dog he 
can swallow him whole and enjoy that one meal 
in unriotous bliss for weeks. Thereafter if he 
must put up with no more than a minnow or a 
mouse he can do that for weeks in unriotous 

136 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

patience. In a spring in one of our Northamp- 
ton gardens I saw a catfish swallow a frog so 
big that the hind toes stuck out of the devourer's 
mouth for four days; but they went in at last, 
and the fish, in his fishy fashion, from start to 
finish was happy. He was never demoralized. 
It is not so with us. We cannot much distend 
or contract our purely physical needs. Espe- 
cially is any oversupply of them mischievous. 
They have not the reptilian elasticity. Day by 
day they must have just enough. But the civ- 
ihzed man has spiritual wants and they are as 
elastic as air. 

A home is a house well filled with these elastic 
wants. Home-culture is getting such wants into 
households — not merely into single individuals 
— that lack them. What makes a man rich.^ 
Is the term merely comparative? Not merely. 
To be rich is to have, beyond the demands of 
our bodily needs, abundant means to supply 
our spiritual wants. To possess more material 
resources than we can or will use or bestow to 
the spiritual advantage of ourselves and others 
is to be perilously rich, whether we belong to a 

137 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

grinders' union in the cutlery works or to a 
royal family. Why is it so often right that a 
rich college, for example, should, in its money- 
chest, feel poor? Because it could so easily 
supply more spiritual wants if it had more 
money. 

Not low wages will ever make men harmless, 
nor high wages make them happy, nor low nor 
high save them from a spirit of pauperism or of 
malignant envy; but having wages bigger than 
their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants 
numerous and elastic enough to use up the sur- 
plus — spiritual wants, that know both how to 
suffer need and how to abound, and to do either 
without backsliding toward savagery. Whoever 
would help this state of things on, let him seek 
at the same time to increase the home's wage- 
earning power and its spiritual powers to put 
to fine use the wages earned: to augment the 
love of beauty in nature and in art, the love of 
truth and knowledge, the love of achievement 
and of service, the love of God and of human 
society, the ambition to put more into the world 
than we get out of it. Wages will never be too 

138 




"Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants 
numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus." 

The owner of this cottage, who stands on the lawn, spaded and graded it and grassed it 
herself, and by shrubbery plantings about the house's foundation and on the outer 
boundaries of the grass has so transformed it since this picture was taken as to win one 
of the highest prizes awarded among more than a thousand competitors. 




"One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that strangers driving 
by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view." 

A capital prize-winner's back yard which was a sand bank when he entered the competition. 
His front yard is still handsomer. 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

high, nor the hours of a day's work too many or 
too few, which follow that "sliding scale." How 
much our garden contest may do of this sort 
for that cottage on the hill we have yet to know; 
last year was its first in the competition. But 
it has shown the ambition to enter the lists, 
and a number that promised no more at the 
outset have since won prizes. One such was so 
beautiful last year that strangers driving by 
stopped and asked leave to dismount and en- 
joy a nearer view. 

A certain garden to which we early awarded 
a high prize was, and yet remains, among the 
loveliest in Northampton. Its house stands 
perhaps seventy feet back from the public way 
and so nearly at one edge of its broad lot that 
all its exits and entrances are away from that 
side and toward the garden. A lawn and front 
bordered on side by loose hedges of Regel's 
privet and Thunberg's barberry and with only 
one or two slim trees of delicate foliage near 
its street line, rises slightly from the sidewalk 
to the house in a smooth half wave that never 
sinks below any level it has attained and yet 

139 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

consists of two curves. (It takes two curves, 
let us say once more, to make even half of the 
gentlest wave that can be made, if you take 
it from the middle of the crest to the middle 
of the trough, and in our American garden- 
ing thousands of lawns, especially small front 
lawns, are spoiled in their first lay-out by being 
sloped in a single curve instead of in two curves 
bending opposite ways.) Along a side of this 
greensward farthest from the boundary to 
which the house is so closely set are the drive 
and walk, in one, and on the farther side of these, 
next the sun, is the main flower-garden, half 
surrounding another and smaller piece of lawn. 
The dwelling stands endwise to the street and 
broadside to this expanse of bloom. Against 
its front foundations lies a bed of flowering 
shrubs which at the corner farthest from the 
drive swings away along that side's boundary 
line and borders it with shrubbery down to 
the street, the main feature of the group being a 
luxuriant flowering quince as large as ten ordi- 
nary ones and in every springtime a red splendor. 
But the focus of the gardening scheme is at 
140 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

the southeasterly side entrance of the house. 
To this the drive comes on unrigorous Unes from 
the street. The walk curves away a few steps 
earlier to go to the front door but the drive, 
passing on, swings in under the rear corner 
windows and to the kitchen steps, veers around 
by the carriage-house door and so loops back 
into itself. In this loop, and all about the 
bases of the dwelling and carriage-house the 
flowers rise in dense abundance, related to one 
another with clever taste and with a happy 
care for a procession of bloom uninterrupted 
throughout the season. Straightaway from the 
side door, leaving the drive at a right angle, 
runs a short arbor of vines. Four or five steps 
to the left of this bower a clump of shrubbery 
veils the view from the street and in between 
shrubs and arbor lies a small pool of water 
flowers and goldfish. On the arbor's right, in 
charming privacy, masked by hollyhocks, dah- 
lias and other tall-maidenly things, lie beds of 
strawberries and lettuce and all the prim ranks 
and orders of the kitchen garden. 

Words are poor things to paint with; I wish 
141 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

I could set forth all in one clear picture: lawn, 
drive, house, loop, lily pond, bower, rose-bordered 
drive again (as the eye comes back) and flowers 
crowding before, behind and beside you, some 
following clear out to the street and beseeching 
you not to go so soon. Such is the garden, 
kept without hired labor, of two soft-handed 
women; not beyond criticism in any of its 
aspects but bearing witness to their love of 
nature, of beauty and of home and of their 
wisdom and skill to exalt and refine them. 

This competitor early won, I say, a leading 
prize, and in later seasons easily held — still 
holds — a fine pre-eminence. Yet the later 
prizes fell to others, because, while this one 
had been a beautiful garden for years before 
the competition began, they, rising from much 
newer and humbler beginnings, sometimes from 
very chaos, showed between one season and the 
next far greater advances toward artistic ex- 
cellence. In the very next year a high prize 
fell to a garden in full sight of this one, a garden 
whose makers had caught their inspiration from 
this one, and, copying its art, had brought forth 

142 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

a charming result out of what our judges de- 
scribed as "particularly forlorn conditions." 

Does this seem hardly fair to the first garden ? 
But to spread the gardening contagion and to 
instigate a wise copying after the right gar- 
deners — these are what our prizes and honors 
are for. Progress first, perfection afterward, is 
our maxim. We value and reward originality, 
nevertheless, and only count it a stronger neces- 
sity to see not merely that no talented or hap- 
pily circumstanced few, but that not even any 
one or two fortunate neighborhoods, shall pres- 
ently be capturing all the prizes. Hence the 
rules already cited, which a prompt discovery 
of this tendency forced upon us. 

About this copying: no art is more inoffen- 
sively imitated than gardening but unluckily 
none is more easily, or more absurdly, mis- 
copied. A safe way is to copy the gardener 
rather than the garden. To copy any perform- 
ance in a way to do it honor we must discern 
and adapt its art without mimicking its act. 
To miscopy is far easier — we have only to mimic 
the act and murder the art. I once heard a 

143 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

man ask an architect if it would not answer to 
give his plan to the contractor and let him work 
it out without the architect's supervision. 

"My dear sir/' the architect replied, "you 
wouldn't know the corpse." 

I suppose one reason why even the miscopy- 
ing of gardens provokes so little offence is that 
the acts it mimics have no art it can murder. 
Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high ge- 
raingia" in the middle of her tiny grass-plat 
(probably trimming it to look like a ballet- 
dancer on one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd, 
the situation of whose house and grounds is 
not in the least hke her neighbor's, plants and 
trims hers the same way and feels sure it has 
the same effect, for — why shouldn't it ? 

The prize-winning copyist I am telKng of 
copied principles only. To have copied mere 
performance would have been particularly un- 
lucky, for though his garden stands within 
fifty yards of the one from which it drew its 
inspiration the two are so differently located 
that the same art principles demand of them 
very different performances. An old-time lover 

144 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

of gardens whom I have to quote at second-hand 
mentions in contrast "gardens to look in upon" 
and "gardens to look out from." The garden 
I have described at length is planned to be 
looked in upon; most town gardens must be, 
of course; but its competitor across the street, 
of which I am about to give account, is an ex- 
ception. The lot has a very broad front and 
very little depth — at one side almost none, at 
the other barely enough for a small house 
and a few feet of front yard. Why there should 
be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken 
into the general scheme that to call it to account 
would be ungenerous. It enters at the narrow- 
est part of the ground, farthest from the house, 
makes a long parabola, and turns again into 
the street close beside the dwelling. In the bit 
of lawn thus marked oflf, shrubs have place near 
the street, three or four old apple-trees range 
down the middle, and along the drive runs a 
gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear 
side of the drive Hes but a narrow strip of turf 
beyond which the ground drops all at once to 
another level some thirty feet below. On the 

145 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

right this fall is so abrupt that the only way 
down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On the 
left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is 
broken into narrow terraces, from top to bot- 
tom of which, and well out on the lower level, 
the entire space is mantled with the richly 
burdened trellises of a small vineyard. At the 
right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden; 
beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to 
build on, but fruitful in hay and grain; farther 
away, on higher ground, the town again shows 
its gables and steeples among its great maples 
and elms, and still beyond, some three miles 
distant, the green domes and brown precipices 
of the Mount Holyoke Range stand across the 
sky in sharp billows of forest and rock. It 
seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and 
Mount Tom cannot themselves know how 
many modest gardens they are a component 
part of — the high violin note of: gardens, like 
this one, "to look out from." 

It stops one's pen for one to find himself 
using the same phrases for these New England 
cottage gardens that famous travellers have 

146 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

used in telling of the gardens of Italian princes; 
yet why should we not, when the one nature 
and the one art are mother and godmother of 
them all ? It is a laughing wonder what beauty 
can be called into life about the most unpre- 
tentious domicile, out of what ugliness such 
beauty can be evoked and at how trivial a 
cost in money. Three years before this *^ garden 
to look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was 
for the most part a rubbish heap. Let me 
now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions 
still more unlovely because cramped and shut in. 
It was on the other side of the town from 
those I have been telling of. The house stood 
broadside to the street and flush with the side- 
walk. The front of the lot was only broad 
enough for the house and an alley hardly four 
feet wide between the house's end and a high, 
tight board fence. The alley led into a small, 
square back yard one of whose bounds was the 
back fence of the house. On a second side was 
a low, mossy, picturesquely old wing-building 
set at right angles to the larger house, its doors 
and windows letting into the yard. A third 

147 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

boundary was the side of one well weathered 
barn and the back of another, with a scanty 
glimpse between them of meadows stretching 
down to the Connecticut River. The fourth 
was an open fence marking off a field of riotous 
weeds. When the tenant mistress of this un- 
promising spot began to occupy it the yard and 
alley were a free range for the poultry of the 
neighborhood, and its only greenery was two 
or three haphazard patches of weedy turf. 
One-fourth of the ground, in the angle made 
by the open fence and one of the barns, had been 
a hen-yard and was still inclosed within a high 
wire-netting; but outside that space every 
plant she set out had to be protected from the 
grubbing fowls by four stakes driven down with 
a hammer. Three years afterward she bore off 
our capital prize in a competition of one hun- 
dred gardens. Let me tell what the judges 
found. 

Out in the street, at the off side of the alley- 
gate, between a rude fence and an electric- 
railway siding, in about as much space as 
would give standing room to one horse and 

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"Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile." 

One of a great number of competing cottages whose gardens are handsomer in the rear and 
out of sight than on the street-front, though well kept there also. 




"Those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them." 

The aged owner of this place has hired no help for twenty years. Behind her honey-locust 
hedge a highly kept and handsome flower and shrubbery garden fills the whole house lot. 
She is a capital prize-winner. 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

cart, bloomed — not by right of lease, but by 
permission of the railway company — a wealth 
of annual flowers, the lowest (pansies and such 
like) at the outer edge, the tallest against the 
unsightly fence. This was the prelude. In the 
alley the fence was clothed with vines; the win- 
dows — of which there were two — were decked 
with boxes of plumbago — pink, violet, white 
and blue, and of lady-ferns and maiden-hair. 
The back yard was a soft, smooth turf wher- 
ever there were not flowers. Along the back 
doors and windows of the house and the low- 
roofed wing a rough arbor was covered with a 
vine whose countless blossoms scented the air 
and feasted the bees, while its luminous canopy 
sheltered a rare assemblage of such flowers as 
bloom and thrive only for those whom they 
know and trust. But the crowning transforma- 
tion was out in the open sunlight, in the space 
which had been the hen-yard. Within it was a 
holiday throng of the gardening world's best- 
known and loved gentles and commons, from 
roses down to forget-me-nots. Its screen of 
poultry-netting had been kept in place, and no 

149 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

feature on the premises more charmingly showed 
that this floral profusion came of no mere greed 
for abundance or diversity, but of a true art 
instinct recognizing the limits of its resources. 
The garden had to be made a "garden to look 
in upon," a veritable imprisoned garden; the 
question of expense required it to be chiefly of 
annuals, and all the structural features of the 
place called for concealment. These wire net- 
tings did so; on their outside, next the grass, 
two complete groups of herbaceous things were 
so disposed as to keep them veiled in bloom 
throughout the whole warm half of the year. 
Close against them and overpeering their tops 
were hollyhocks and dahlias; against these stood 
at lesser height sweet peas, asters, zinnias, 
coreopsis and others of like stature; in front of 
these were poppies for summer, marigolds for 
autumn; beneath these again were verbenas, 
candytuft — all this is sketched from memory, 
and I recall the winsome effect rather than 
species and names; and still below nestled por- 
tulaca and periwinkle. I fear the enumeration 
gives but a harlequin effect; but the fault of 

150 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

that is surely mine, for the result was delight- 
ful. 

I have ventured to make report of these two 
or three gardens, not as in themselves worthy 
of a great public's consideration and praise 
but as happy instances of a fruitage we are 
gathering among hundreds of homes in a little 
city where it is proposed to give every home, if 
possible, its utmost value. Many other pleas- 
ing examples could be cited if further turnings 
of the kaleidoscope were a real need, but this 
slender discourse is as long now as it should be. 
It seems droll to call grave attention to such 
humble things in a world so rightly preoccupied 
with great sciences and high arts, vast industries, 
shining discoveries and international rivalries, 
strifes and projects; yet what are all these for, 
at last, but the simple citizen, his family and his 
home, and for him and them in the cottage as 
well as in the palace? The poor man's home 
may shine dimly but it is one of the stars by 
which civilization must guide its onward course. 

It may well be supposed that those whose 
oflSce it is to award the twenty-one prizes of our 

151 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

garden competition among our eleven hundred 
competitors have an intricate task. Yet some 
of its intricacies add to the pleasure of it. 

One of these pleasing complications arises 
from our division of the field of contest into 
seven parts, in each of which prizes must be 
given to three contestants. Another comes from 
our rule that not alone the competitors who 
show the best gardening are to be rewarded, 
but also those who have made the most earnest 
effort and largest progress toward the best gar- 
dening. Under this plan one whose work shows 
a patient and signal progress in the face of 
many disadvantages may outrank on our prize 
list a rival whose superior artistic result has 
been got easily under favoring conditions and 
reveals no marked advance beyond the season 
before. 

After the manner of Dunfermline again, our 
rules are that no gardener by trade and no one 
who hires help in his garden may compete. Any 
friend may help his friend, and any one may use 
all the advice he can get from amateur or pro- 
fessional. Children may help in the care of 

152 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

the gardens, and many do; but children may not 
themselves put gardens into the competition. 

"If the head of the house is the gardener-in- 
chief," shrewdly argued one of our committee, 
"the children, oftener than otherwise, will gar- 
den with him, or will catch the gardening spirit 
as they grow up; but if the children are head- 
gardeners we shall get only children's gardening. 
We want to dispel the notion that flower-garden- 
ing is only woman's work and child's play." 

Our rule against hired labor sets naturally a 
maximum limit to the extent of ground a garden 
may cover. Our minimum is but fifty square 
yards, including turf, beds, and walks, and it 
may be of any shape whatever if only it does 
not leave out any part of the dooryard, front or 
rear, and give it up to neglect and disorder. To 
the ear even fifty square yards seems extensive, 
but really it is very small. It had so formidable 
a sound when we first named it that one of our 
most esteemed friends, pastor of a Catholic 
church in that very pretty and thrifty part of 
Northampton called for its silk mills Florence, 
generously added two supplementary prizes for 

153 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

gardens under the limit of size. This happy 
thought had a good eflFect, for, although in the 
first and second years Father Gallen's people 
took prizes for gardens above the minimum 
limit in size, while his own two prizes fell to 
contestants not in his flock, yet only in the 
third year did it become to all of us quite as 
plain as a pikestafl' that fifty square yards are 
only the one-fiftieth part of fifty yards square, 
and that whoever in Northampton had a door- 
yard at all had fifty square yards. In 1903 
more than two hundred and fifty gardens were 
already in the contest but every one was large 
enough to compete for the Carnegie prizes, and 
the kind bestower of the extra ones (withdrawn 
as superfluous), unselfishly ignoring his own large 
share of credit, wrote: 

"Your gardens have altered the aspect of my 
parish." 

Such praise is high wages. It is better than 
to have achieved the very perfection of garden- 
ing about any one home. We are not trying to 
raise the world's standard of the gardening art. 
Our work is for the home and its indwellers; 

154 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

for the home and the town. Our ideal is a town 
of homes all taking pleasant care of one an- 
other. We want to make all neighbors and all 
homes esthetically interesting to one another, 
believing that this will relate them humanely, 
morally and politically. We began with those 
who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them, 
but soon we went further and ventured to 
open to gardens kept with hired service an allied 
competition for a separate list of prizes. In this 
way we put into motion, between two elements 
of our people which there are always more than 
enough influences to hold sufliciently apart, a 
joint pursuit of the same refining delight and 
so promoted the fellowship of an unconflicting 
common interest. In degree some of us who 
use hired help had already obtained this effect. 
Last season: 

"Come," I often heard one of our judges say 
on his rounds, '^see my own garden some after- 
noon; I'll show you all the mistakes I've made !" 
And some came, and exchanged seeds and plants 
with him. 

"A high civilization," said an old soldier to me 
155 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

only a few days ago, "must always produce great 
social inequalities. They are needed mainly by 
and for those who see no need of them." 

I admitted that the need is as real, though not 
so stern, as the need of inequalities in military 
rank. 

"But," I said, "in the military relation you 
must also vividly keep up, across all inequalities 
of rank, a splendid sentiment of common inter- 
est and devotion, mutual confidence and aJBFec- 
tion, or your army will be but a broken weapon, 
a sword without a hilt." 

"Yes," he agreed, "and so in civilization; if 
it would be of the highest it must draw across 
its lines of social cleavage the bonds of civic fel- 
lowship." 

It was what I had intended to say myself. 
Social selection raises walls between us which 
we all help to build, but they need not be 
Chinese walls. They need not be so high that 
civic fellowship, even at its most feminine 
stature, may not look over them every now and 
then to ask: 

**How does my neighbor's garden grow?" 

156 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

It is with this end in view as well as for 
practical convenience that we have divided our 
field into seven districts and from our ''women's 
council" have appointed residents of each to 
visit, animate and counsel the contestants of 
that district. The plan works well. 

On the other hand, to prevent the move- 
ment, in any district, from shrinking into vil- 
lage isolation; in order to keep the whole town 
comprised, and, as nearly as may be, to win the 
whole town's sympathy and participation, we 
have made a rule that in whatever district the 
capital prize is awarded, the second prize must 
go to some other district. If we have said this 
before you may slip it here; a certain repeti- 
tiousness is one part of our policy. A competi- 
tor in the district where the capital prize is 
awarded may take the third prize, but no one 
may take the third in the district where the 
second has been awarded. He may, however, 
be given the fourth. In a word, no two con- 
secutive prizes can be won in the same district. 
Also, not more than three prizes of the fifteen 
may in one season be awarded in any one district. 

157 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

So each district has three prize-winners each 
year, and each year the prizes go all over town. 
Again, no garden may take the same prize two 
years in succession; it must take a higher one 
or else wait over. 

"This prize-garden business is just all right !" 
said one of the competitors to our general secre- 
tary. "It gives us good things to say to one 
another's face instead o' bad things at one an- 
other's back, it does!" 

That is a merit we claim for it; that it oper- 
ates, in the most inexpensive way that can be, to 
restore the social bond. Hard poverty minus 
village neighborship drives the social relation 
out of the home and starves out of its victims 
their spiritual powers to interest and entertain 
one another, or even themselves. If something 
could keep alive the good aspects of village 
neighborship without disturbing what is good in 
that more energetic social assortment which 
follows the expansion of the village into the 
town or city, we should have better and fairer 
towns and cities and a sounder and safer civili- 
zation. But it must be something which will 

158 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

give entirely differing social elements "good 
things to say to one another's face instead of bad 
things at one another's back." 

We believe our Northampton garden com- 
petition tends to do this. It brings together 
in neighborly fellowship those whom the dis- 
crepancies of social accomplishments would for- 
ever hold asunder and it brings them together 
without forced equality or awkward condescen- 
sion, civic partners in that common weal to 
neglect which is one of the "dangers and temp- 
tations of the home." 

Two of our committee called one day at a 
house whose garden seemed to have fallen into 
its ill condition after a very happy start. Its 
mistress came to the door wearing a heart- weary 
look. The weather had been very dry, she 
said in a melodious French accent, and she 
had not felt so very well, and so she had not 
cared to struggle for a garden, much less for a 
prize. 

"But the weather," suggested her visitors, 
"had been quite as dry for her competitors, and 
few of them had made so fair a beginning. To 

159 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

say nothing of prizes, was not the garden itself 
its own reward ? " 

She shook her head drearily; she did not 
know that she should ever care to garden any 
more. 

"Why?" exclaimed one questioner persua- 
sively, "you didn't talk so when I was here last 
month!" 

"No," was the reply, "but since three week' 
ag-o — " and all at once up came the stifled 
tears, fiUing her great black eyes and coursing 
down her cheeks unhindered, "I los' my baby." 

The abashed visitors stammered such apolo- 
gies as they could. "They would not have come 
on this untimely errand could they have known." 
They begged forgiveness for their slowness to 
perceive. 

"Yet do not wholly," they presently ven- 
tured to urge, "give up your garden. The day 
may come when the thought that is now so 
bitter will, as a memory, yield some sweetness 
as well, and then it may be that the least of 
bitterness and the most of sweetness will come 
to you when you are busy among your flowers." 

160 



THE PRIVATE GARDEN 

"It may be," she sighed, but with an uncon- 
vinced shrug. And still, before the summer was 
gone, the garden sedately, yet very sweetly, 
smiled again and even the visitors ventured 
back. 

That was nearly three years ago. Only a 
few weeks since those two were in the company 
of an accomplished man who by some chance — 
being a Frenchman — had met and talked with 
this mother and her husband. 

"We made a sad bungle there," said the 
visitors. 

"Do not think it !" he protested. "They are 
your devoted friends. They speak of you with 
the tenderest regard. Moreover, I think they 
told me that last year — " 

"Yes," rejoined one of the visitors, "last year 
their garden took one of the prizes." 



161 



THE MIDWINTER GARDENS 
OF NEW ORLEANS 



THE MIDWINTER GARDENS 
OF NEW ORLEANS 

IF the following pages might choose their 
own time and place they would meet their 
reader not in the trolley-car or on the suburban 
train, but in his own home, comfortably seated. 
For in order to justify the eulogistic tone of the 
descriptions which must presently occupy them 
their first word must be a conciliatory protest 
against hurry. One reason we Americans gar- 
den so little is that we are so perpetually in 
haste. The art of gardening is primarily a 
leisurely and gentle one. 

And gentility still has some rights. Our 
Louisiana Creoles know this, and at times 
maintain it far beyond the pales of their ever- 
green gardens. 

" ^Step lively '.f^" one of them is said to have 
amazedly retorted in a New York street-car. 
"No, the lady shall not step lively. At yo' 

165 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

leisure, madame, entrez!" In New Orleans 
the conductors do not cry *'Step lively!" Right 
or wrong, the cars there are not absolutely 
democratic. Gentility really enjoys in them a 
certain right to be treated gently. 

If democracy could know its own tyrants it 
would know that one of them is haste — the 
haste, the hurry of the crowd; that hurry whose 
cracking whip makes every one a compulsory 
sharer in it. The street-car conductor, poor lad, 
is not to blame. The fault is ours, many of 
us being in such a scramble to buy democracy 
at any price that, as if we were belatedly buying 
railway tickets, we forget to wait for our change. 

Now one of this tyrant's human forms is a 
man a part of whose tyranny is to call himself 
a gardener, though he knows he is not one, and 
the symbol of whose oppression is nothing more 
or less than that germ enemy of good garden- 
ing, the lawn-mower. You, if you know the 
gardening of our average American home al- 
most anywhere else, would see, yourself, how 
true this is, were you in New Orleans. But you 
see it beautifully proved not by the presence 

166 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

but by the absence of the tyranny. The lawn- 
mower is there, of course; no one is going to 
propose that the lawn-mower anywhere be 
abolished. It is one of our modern marvels 
of convenience, a blessed release of countless 
human backs from countless hours of crouching, 
sickle-shaped, over the sickle. It is not the 
tyrant, but only like so many other instruments 
of beneficent democratic emancipation, the ty- 
rant's opportunity. A large part of its conven- 
ience is expedition, and expedition is the eas- 
iest thing in the world to become vulgarized: 
vulgarized it becomes haste, and haste is the 
tyrant. Such arguing would sound absurdly 
subtle aimed against the uncloaked, barefaced 
tyranny of the street-car conductor, but the 
tyranny of the man with the lawn-mower is 
itself subtle, masked, and requires subtlety to 
unmask it. 

See how it operates. For so we shall be the 
better prepared for a generous appreciation of 
those far Southern gardens whose beauty has 
singled them out for our admiration. We know, 
of course, that the *' formal garden," by reason 

167 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

of its initial and continuing costliness, is, and 
must remain, the garden of the* wealthy few, 
and that the gardening for the great democracy 
of our land, the kind that will make the country 
at large a gardened land, is "informal," free- 
hand, ungeometrical gardening. In this sort, 
on whatever scale, whether of the capitalist or 
of the cottager, the supreme feature is the lawn; 
the lawn-mower puts this feature within the 
reach of all, and pretty nearly every American 
householder has, such as it is, his bit of Eden. 

But just in that happy moment the Tempter 
gets in. The garden's mistress or master is 
beguiled to believe that one may have a garden 
without the expense of a gardener and at the 
same time without any gardening knowledge. 
The stable-boy, or the man-of-all-work, or the 
cook, or the cottager himself, pushes the lawn- 
mower, and except for green grass, or change- 
able brown and green, their bit of Eden is naked 
and is not ashamed. 

Or if ashamed, certain other beguilements, 
other masked democratic tyrannies, entering, 
reassure it: bliss of publicity, contempt of skill, 

168 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

and joy in machinery and machine results. 
An itinerant ignoramus comes round with his 
own lawn-mower, the pushing of which he now 
makes his sole occupation for the green half of 
the year, and the entire length, breadth and 
thickness of whose wisdom is a wisdom not of 
the lawn but only of the lawn-mower: how to 
keep its bearings oiled and its knives chewing 
fine; and the lawn becomes staringly a factory 
product. 

Then tyranny turns the screw again, and in 
the bliss of publicity and a very reasonable de- 
sire to make the small home lot look as large 
as possible, down come the fences, side and 
front, and the applauding specialist of the lawn- 
mower begs that those obstructions may never 
be set up again, because now the householder 
can have his lawn mowed so much quiclcer, 
and he, the pusher, can serve more customers. 
Were he truly a gardener he might know some- 
what of the sweet, sunlit, zephyrous, fragrant 
out-door privacies possible to a real garden, and 
more or less of that benign art which, by skil- 
ful shrubbery plantings, can make a small 

169 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

place look much larger — as well as incompa- 
rably more interesting — than can any mere 
abohtion of fences, and particularly of the street 
fence. But he has not so much as one eye of 
a genuine gardener or he would know that he 
is not keeping your lawn but only keeping it 
shaven. He is not even a good garden laborer. 
You might as well ask him how to know the 
wild flowers as how to know the lawn pests — 
dandehon, chickweed, summer-grass, heal-all, 
moneywort and the like — with which you must 
reckon wearily by and by because he only 
mows them in his blindness and lets them 
flatten to the ground and scatter their seed 
like an infantry firing-line. Inquire of him 
concerning any one of the few orphan shrubs 
he has permitted you to set where he least 
dislikes them, and which he has trimmed clear 
of the sod — put into short skirts — so that he 
may run his whirling razors under (and now 
and then against) them at full speed. Will he 
know the smallest fact about it or yield any 
echo of your interest in it.^^ 

There is a late story of an aged mother, in a 
170 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

darkened room, saying falteringly to the kind 
son who has brought in some flowers which she 
caresses with her soft touch, "I was wishing 
to-day — We used to have them in the yard 
— before the lawn-mower — " and saying no 
more. I know it for a fact, that in a certain 
cemetery the "Sons of the American Revolu- 
tion" have for years been prevented from 
setting up their modest marks of commemora- 
tion upon the graves of Revolutionary heroes, 
because they would be in the way of the sexton's 
lawn-mower. 

Now in New Orleans the case is so diflferent 
that really the amateur gardener elsewhere has 
not all his rights until he knows why it is so 
different. Let us, therefore, look into it. In 
that city one day the present writer accosted 
an Irishman who stood, pruning-shears in hand, 
at the foot of Clay's statue, Lafayette Square. 
It was the first week of January, but beside 
him bloomed abundantly that lovely drooping 
jasmine called in the books jasminum multi- 
florum. 

"Can you tell me what shrub this is.^" 
171 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

"That, sor, is the monthly floral Thim as 
don't know the but-hanical nayum sometimes 
calls it the stare jismin, but the but-hanical 
nayum is the monthly flora. ""^ 

The inquirer spoke his thanks and passed on, 
but an eager footfall overtook him, his elbow 
felt a touch, and the high title came a third 
time: "The but-hanical nayum is the monthly 
fiorar 

The querist passed on, warmed by a grateful 
esteem for one who, though doubtless a skilled 
and frequent tinkler of the lawn-mower within 
its just limitations, was no mere dragoon of it, 
but kept a regard for things higher than the 
bare sod, things of grace in form, in bloom, in 
odor, and worthy of "but-hanical nayum." No 
mere chauffeur he, of the little two-wheeled 
machine whose cult, throughout the most of 
our land, has all but exterminated ornamental 
gardening. 

In New Orleans, where it has not conquered, 
there is no crowding for room. A ten-story 
building is called there a sky-scraper. The 
town has not a dozen in all, and not one of that 

172 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

stature is an apartment or tenement house. 
Having felled her surrounding forests of cypress 
and drained the swamps in which they stood, 
she has at command an open plain capable of 
housing a population seven times her present 
three hundred and fifty thousand, if ever she 
chooses to build skyward as other cities do. 

But this explains only why New Orleans 
might have gardens, not why she chooses to 
have them, and has them by thousands, when 
hundreds of other towns that have the room — 
and the lawns — choose not to have the shrub- 
beries, vines and flowers, or have them with- 
out arrangement. Why should New Orleans so 
exceptionally choose to garden, and garden 
with such exceptional grace? Her house-lots 
are extraordinarily numerous in proportion to 
the numbers of her people, and that is a begin- 
ning of the explanation; but it is only a be- 
ginning. Individually the most of those lots 
are no roomier than lots elsewhere. Thousands 
of them, prettily planted, are extremely small. 

The explanation lies mainly in certain pe- 
culiar limitations, already hinted, of her — • 

173 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

democracy ! That is to say, it lies in her fences. 
Her fences remain, her democracy is different 
from the Northern variety. The difference may 
consist only in faults both there and here which 
we all hope to see democracy itself one day 
eliminate; but the difference is palpable. The 
fences mean that the dwellers behind them 
have never accorded to each other, as neighbors, 
that liberty-to-take-hberties of which Northern 
householders and garden-holders, after a quar- 
ter-century's disappointing experiment, are a bit 
weary. 

In New Orleans virtually every home, be it 
ever so proud or poor, has a fence on each of 
its four sides. As a result the home is bounded 
by its fences, not by its doors. Unpleasant ne- 
cessities these barriers are admitted to be, and 
those who have them are quite right in not 
liking them in their bare anatomy. So they 
clothe them with shrubberies and vines and 
thus on the home's true corporate bound the 
garden's profile, countenance and character are 
established in the best way possible; without, 
that is, any impulse toward embelhshment in- 

174 




"In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its doors 
— so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines." 

It is pleasant to notice how entirely the evergreen-vine-covered wall preserves the general 
air of spaciousness. The forest tree at the front and right (evergreen magnolia) is covered 
with an evergreen vine from the turf to its branches. 



•^ 



ac^ 



^^■'■■■■>«* 



.^.'^^M 






"The lawn . . . lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and- 
flower-planted side to the other, along and across." 

A common garden feature in New Orleans is the division fence with front half of wire, rear 
half of boards, both planted out with shrubs. The overhanging forest tree is the ever- 
green magnoHa (M. grandi flora) . 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

sulated from utility. Compelled by the common 
frailties of all human nature (even in a democ- 
racy) to maintain fortifications, the householder 
has veiled the militant aspect of his defences 
in the flowered robes and garlandries of nature's 
diplomacy and hospitality. Thus reassured, his 
own inner hospitality can freely overflow into 
the fragrant open air and out upon the lawn — 
a lawn whose dimensions are enlarged to both 
eye and mind, inasmuch as every step around 
its edges — around its meandering shrubbery 
borders — is made affable and entertaining by 
Flora's versatilities. 

At the same time, let us note in passing, 
this enlargement is partly because the lawn 
— not always but very much oftener than 
where lawns go unenclosed — lies clean-breast- 
ed, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower- 
planted side to the other, along and across; 
free of bush, statue, urn, fountain, sun-dial or 
pattern-bed, an uninterrupted sward. Even 
where there are lapses from this delightful ex- 
cellence they often do not spoil, but only dis- 
count, more or less, the beauty of the general 

175 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

scheme, as may be noted — if without offence 
we may offer it the homage of criticism — in 
one of the gardens we have photographed 
[page 176] to illustrate these argumentations. 
There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the 
sward without in the least adding to the gar- 
den's abounding charm. The smallest effort of 
the reader's eye will show how largely, in a 
short half-day's work, the fair scene might be 
enhanced in lovely dignity simply by the elim- 
ination of these slight excesses, or by their 
withdrawal toward the lawn's margins and into 
closer company with the tall trees. 

In New Orleans, where, even when there 
are basements, of which there are many, the 
domains of the cook and butler are somewhere 
else, a nearly universal feature of every sort of 
dwelling — the banker's on two or three lots, 
the laborer's on half a one — is a paved walk 
along one side of the house, between the house 
and the lawn, from a front gate to the kitchen. 
Generally there is but the one front gate, facing 
the front door, with a short walk leading directly 
up to this door. In such case the rear walk, be- 

176 




o 
a; 



^0) o -g 



1§ ?| 
C '-n -go 
1— ( ci ^aja 



■^, o 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

ginning at the front door-steps, turns squarely 
along the house's front, then at its corner 
turns again as squarely to the rear as a drill- 
sergeant and follows the dwelling's ground con- 
tour with business precision — being a business 
path. In fact it is only the same path we see 
in uncrowded town life everywhere in our 
land. 

But down there it shows this peculiarity, 
that it is altogether likely to be well bordered 
with blooming shrubs and plants along all that 
side of it next the lawn. Of course it is a fault 
that this shrubbery border — and all the more 
so because it is very apt to be, as in three of our 
illustrations [pages 174, 178, 180], a rose border 
— should, so often as it is, be pinched in be- 
tween parallel edges. "No pinching" is as good 
a rule for the garden as for the kindergarten. 
Manifestly, on the side next the house the edge 
between the walk and the planted border should 
run parallel with the base line of the house, for 
these are business lines and therefore ever so 
properly Hues of promptitude — of the shortest 
practicable distance between two points — hnes 

177 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

of supply and demand, lines of need. For lines 
of need, business speed ! 

But for lines of pleasure, grace and leisure. 
It is the tactful office of this shrubbery border 
to veil the business path from the lawn — from 
the pleasure-ground. Therefore its outside, 
lawn-side edge should be a line of pleasure, 
hence a line of grace, hence not a straight line 
(dead line), nor yet a line of but one lethargic 
curve, but a line of suavity and tranquil on- 
going, a leisurely undulating line. 

Not to have it so is an error, but the error 
is an inoflfensive one easily corrected and the 
merit is that the dwelling's business path is 
greenly, bloomingly screened from its pleasure- 
ground by a lovely natural drapery which at 
the same time furnishes, as far as the path 
goes, the house's robes of modesty. Indeed 
they are furnished farther than the path goes; 
for no good work gathers momentum more 
readily than does good gardening, and the 
householder, having begun so rightly, has now 
nothing to do to complete the main fabric of 
his garden but to carry this flow of natural 

178 




'The rear walk 



. follows the dwelling's ground contour with business 
precision — being a business path." 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

draperies on round the domicile's back and 
farther side and forward to its front again. 
Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even above 
its reach and where it does not conceal, the 
house's architectural faults, thus winsomely en- 
hance all its architectural charm; like a sweet 
human mistress of the place, putting into 
generous shadow all the ill, and into open sun- 
shine all the best, of a husband's strong char- 
acter. (See both right and left foreground of 
illustration on page 178, and right foreground on 
page 180.) 

And now if this New Orleans idea — that 
enough private enclosure to secure good home 
gardening is not incompatible with public free- 
dom, green lawns, good neighborship, sense of 
room and fulness of hospitality, and that a 
house-lot which is a picture is worth more to 
everybody (and therefore is even more demo- 
cratic) than one which is little else than a map 
— if this idea, we say, finds any credence amoiig 
sister cities and towns that may be able to 
teach the Creole city much in other realms of 
art and criticism, let us cast away chalk and 

179 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

charcoal for palette and brush and show in 
floral, arborescent, redolent detail what is the 
actual pictorial excellence of these New Orleans 
gardens. 

For notwithstanding all their shut-in state, 
neither their virtues nor their faults are hid 
from the passing eye. The street fence, oftenest 
of iron, is rarely more than breast-high and is 
always an open fence. Against its inner side 
frequently runs an evergreen hedge never taller 
than the fence's top. Commonly it is not so 
tall, is always well cHpped and is so civil to 
strangers that one would wish to see its like on 
every street front, though he might prefer to 
find it not so invariably of the one sort of growth 
— a small, handsome privet, that is, which 
nevertheless fulfils its office with the perfection 
of a soHd Une of palace sentries. Unluckily 
there still prevails a very old-fashioned tendency 
to treat the front fence as in itself ornamental 
and to forget two things: First, that its naked- 
ness is no part of its ornamental value; that it 
would be much handsomer lightly clothed — 
underclothed — like, probably, its very next 

180 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

neighbor; clothed with a hedge, either close or 
loose, and generously kept below the passer's 
line of sight. And, second, that from the house- 
holder's point of view, looking streetward from 
his garden's inner depth, its fence, when un- 
planted, is a blank interruption to his whole 
fair scheme of meandering foliage and bloom 
which on the other three sides frames in the 
lawn; as though the garden were a lovely stage 
scene with the fence for footlights, and some 
one had left the footlights unlit. 

A lovely stage scene, we say, without a hint 
of the stage's unreality; for the side and rear 
fences and walls, being frankly unornamental, 
call for more careful management than the 
front and are often charmingly treated. (Page 
174.) (See, for an example of a side fence with 
front half of wire and rear half of boards, page 
174, and for solid walls, pages 180 and 184.) 
Where they separate neighbors' front lawns they 
may be low and open, but back of the building- 
line, being of tenest tight and generally more than 
head-high, they are sure to be draped with such 
climbing floral fineries as honeysuckles, ivies, 

181 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

jasmines white and yellow, lantanas, roses or 
the Madeira vine. More frequently than not 
they are planted also, in strong masses, with 
ever so many beautiful sorts of firmer-stemmed 
growths, herbaceous next the sod, woody be- 
hind, assembled according to stature, from one 
to twelve feet high, swinging in and out around 
the lawn until all stiffness of boundaries is 
waved and smiled away. 

In that first week of January already men- 
tioned the present writer saw at every turn, in 
such borders and in leaf and blossom, the deli- 
cate blue-flowered plumbago; two or three 
kinds of white jasmine, also in bloom; and the 
broad bush-form of the yellow jasmine, begin- 
ning to flower. With them were blooming 
roses of a dozen kinds; the hibiscus (not althaea 
but the H. rosasinensis of our Northern green- 
houses), slim and tall, flaring its mallow- 
flowers pink, orange, salmon and deep red; 
the trailing-lantana, covering broad trelKses of 
ten feet in height and with its drooping masses 
of delicate foliage turned from green to mingled 
hues of hlac and rose by a complete mantle of 

18S 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

their blossoms. He saw the low, sweet-scented 
geraniums of lemon, rose and nutmeg odors, 
persisting through the winter unblighted, and 
the round-leaved, "zonal" sorts surprisingly- 
large of growth — in one case, on a division 
fence, trained to the width and height of six 
feet. There, too, was the poinsettia still bend- 
ing in its Christmas red, taller than the tallest 
man's reach, often set too forthpushingly at the 
front, but at times, with truer art, glowing like 
a red constellation from the remoter bays of 
the lawn; and there, taller yet, the evergreen 
Magnolia fuscata, full of its waxen, cream- 
tinted, inch-long flowers smelling delicately like 
the banana. He found the sweet olive, of re- 
fined leaf and minute axillary flowers yielding 
their ravishing tonic odor with the reserve of 
the violet; the pittosporum; the box; the myrtle; 
the camphor-tree with its neat foliage answer- 
ing fragrantly the grasp of the hand. The dark 
camellia was there, as broad and tall as a lilac- 
bush, its firm, glossy leaves of the deepest green 
and its splendid red flowers covering it from 
tip to sod, one specimen showing by count a 

183 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

thousand blossoms open at once and the sod 
beneath innumerably starred with others al- 
ready fallen. The night jasmine, in full green, 
was not yet in blossom but it was visibly think- 
ing of the spring. The Chinese privet, of twenty 
feet stature, in perennial leaf, was saving its 
flowers for May. The sea-green oleander, fif- 
teen feet high and wide (see extreme left fore- 
ground, page 176), drooped to the sward on four 
sides but hoarded its floral cascade for June. 
The evergreen loquat (locally miscalled the 
mespilus plum) was already faltering into bloom; 
also the orange, with its flower-buds among its 
pohshed leaves, whitening for their own wed- 
ding; while high over them towered the date 
and other palms, spired the cedar and arbor- 
vitse, and with majestic infrequency, where 
grounds were ample, spread the lofty green, 
scintillating boughs of the magnolia grandiflora 
(see left foregrounds on pages 174, 182 and 184), 
the giant, winter-bare pecan and the wide, mossy 
arms of the vast live-oak. 

Now while the time of year in which these 
conditions are visible heightens their lovely 

184 




Back of the building-line the fences . . . generally more than head-high 
. . . are sure to be draped." 




". . . from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter." 

In any garden as fair as this there should be some place to sit down. This deficiency is 
one of the commonest faults in American gardening. 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

wonder, their practical value to Northern home- 
lovers is not the marvel and delight of some- 
thing inimitable but their inspiring suggestion 
of what may be done with ordinary Northern 
home grounds, to the end that the floral pag- 
eantry of the Southern January may be fully 
rivalled by the glory of the Northern June. 

For of course the Flora of the North, who 
in the winter of long white nights puts off all 
her jewelry and nearly all her robes and "lies 
down to pleasant dreams," is the blonde sister 
of, and equal heiress with, this darker one who, 
in undivested greenery and flowered trappings, 
persists in open-air revelry through all the 
months from the autumn side of Christmas to 
the summer side of Easter. Wherefore it seems 
to me the Northern householder's first step 
should be to lay hold upon this New Orleans 
idea in gardening — which is merely by adop- 
tion a New Orleans idea, while through and 
through, except where now and then its votaries 
stoop to folly, it is by book a Northern voice, 
the garden gospel of Frederick Law Olmsted. 

Wherever American homes are assembled we 
185 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

may have, all winter, for the asking — if we 
will but ask ourselves instead of the lawn- 
mower man — an effect of home, of comfort, 
cheer and grace, of summer and autumn remi- 
niscences and of spring's anticipations, immeas- 
urably better than any ordinary eye or fancy 
can extort from the rectangular and stiflened- 
out nakedness of unplanted boundaries; im- 
measurably better than the month-by-month 
daily death-stare of shroud-like snow around 
houses standing barefooted on the frozen ground. 
It may be by hearty choice that we abide where 
we must forego outdoor roses in Christmas 
week and broad-leaved evergreens blooming at 
New Year's, Twelfth-night or Carnival. Well 
and good ! But we can have even in mid- 
January, and ought to allow ourselves, the lawn- 
garden's surviving form and tranced life rather 
than the shrubless lawn's unmarked grave 
flattened beneath the void of the snow. We 
ought to retain the sleeping beauty of the 
ordered garden's unlost configuration, with the 
warm house for its bosom, with all its remoter 
contours — alleys, bays, bushy networks and 

186 




The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration . 
winter's share of its feminine grace and softness. 



keeping a 



This picture was taken in the first flush of spring. The trees in blossom are the wild 
Japanese cherry. 



MIDWINTER GARDENS 

sky-line — keeping a winter share of their 
feminine grace and softness. We ought to re- 
tain the "frozen music" of its myriad gray, 
red and yellow stems and twigs and Ungering 
blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaf- 
lessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to 
retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers 
and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and 
cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these, 
receiving from and giving to them a cheer which 
neither could have in their frostbound Eden 
without mutual contrast. 

Eden ! If I so recklessly ignore latitude as 
to borrow the name of the first gardener's 
garden for such a shivering garden as this it 
is because I see this one in a dream of hope — a 
difiident, interrogating hope — really to behold, 
some day, this dream-garden of Northern winters 
as I have never with actual open eyes found one 
kept by any merely well-to-do American citizen. 
If I describe it I must preface with all the dis- 
claimers of a self-conscious amateur whose most 
venturesome argument goes no farther than 
"Why not.^" yet whom the evergreen gardens 

187 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

of New Orleans revisited in January impel to 
protest against every needless submission to 
the tyrannies of frost and of a gardening art — 
or non-art, a submission which only in the out- 
door embelhshment of the home takes winter 
supinely, abjectly. 

This garden of a hope's dream covers but 
three ordinary town lots. Often it shrinks to 
but one without asking for any notable change 
of plan. Following all the lines, the hard, law 
lines, that divide it from its neighbors and the 
street, there runs, waist-high on its street front, 
shoulder-high on its side bounds, a close ever- 
green hedge of hemlock spruce. In its young 
way this hedge has been handsome from in- 
fancy; though still but a few years old it gives, 
the twelvemonth round, a note both virile and 
refined in color, texture and form, and if the 
art that planted it and the care that keeps it 
do not decay neither need the hedge for a cen- 
tury to come. Against the intensest cold this 
side of Labrador it is perfectly hardy, is 
trimmed with a sloping top to shed snows 
whose weight might mutilate it, and can be 

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MIDWINTER GARDENS 

kept in repair from generation to generation, 
like the house's plumbing or roof, or like some 
green-uniformed pet regiment with ranks yet 
full after the last of its first members has per- 
ished. 

Furthermore, along the inner side of this 
green hedge (sometimes close against it, some- 
times with a turfed alley between), as well as 
all round about the house, extend borders of de- 
ciduous shrubs, with such meandering boundaries 
next the broad white lawn as the present writer, 
for this time, has probably extolled enough. 
These bare, gray shrub masses are not wholly 
bare or gray and have other and most pleas- 
ingly visible advantages over unplanted, pallid 
vacancy, others besides the mere lace-work of 
their twigs and the occasional tenderness of a 
last summer's bird's nest. Here and there, 
breaking the cold monotone, a bush of moose 
maple shows the white-streaked green of its 
bare stems and sprays, or cornus or willow gives 
a soft glow of red, purple or yellow. Only 
here and there, insists my dream, lest when 
winter at length gives way to the ''rosy time 

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

of the year" their large and rustic gentleness 
mar the nuptial revels of summer's returned 
aristocracy. Because, moreover, there is a far 
stronger effect of life, home and cheer from 
the broad-leaved evergreens which, in duly 
limited numbers, assemble with and behind 
these, and from the lither sorts of conifers that 
spire out of the network and haze of living 
things in winter sleep. The plantings at the 
garden's and dwelling's front being properly, of 
course, lower than those farther back, I see 
among them, in this dream, the evergreen box 
and several kinds of evergreen ferns. I see two 
or three species of evergreen barberries, not to 
speak of Thunberg's leafless one warm red with 
its all-winter berries, the winter garden's rubric. 
I see two varieties of euonymus; various low 
junipers; two sorts of laurel; two of andromeda, 
and the high-clambering evergreen ivy. Be- 
ginning with these in front, infrequent there 
but multiplying toward the place's rear, are 
bush and tree forms of evergreen holly, native 
rhododendrons, the many sorts of foreign cedars 
and our native ones white and red, their sky- 

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MIDWINTER GARDENS 

ward lines modified as the square or pointed 
architecture of the house may call for con- 
trasts in pointed or broad-topped arborescence. 
If, at times, I dream behind all this a grove, 
with now and then one of its broad, steepling 
or columnar trees pushed forward upon the 
lawn, it is only there that I see anything so 
stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce. 

Such is the vision, and if I never see it with 
open eyes and in real sunlight, even as a dream 
it is — like certain other things of less dignity 
— grateful, comforting. I warrant there are 
mistakes in it, but you will find mistakes wher- 
ever you find achievement, and there is no law 
against them — in well-meant dreams. Ob- 
serve, if you please, this vision lays no draw- 
back on the garden's summer beauty and 
afl3uence. Twelve months of the year it en- 
hances its dignity and elegance. Both the 
numerical proportions of evergreens to other 
greens, and the scheme of their distribution, 
are quite as correct and effective for contrast 
and background to the transient foliage and 
countless flowers of July as amid the bare 

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

ramage of January. Summer and winter alike, 
the gravest items among them all, the conifers, 
retain their values even in those New Orleans 
gardens. When we remember that in New 
England and on all its isotherm it is winter all 
that half of the year when most of us are at 
home, why should we not seek to realize this 
snow-garden dream .^ Even a partial or faulty 
achievement of it will surely look lovelier than 
the naked house left out on its naked white 
lawn like an unclaimed trunk on a way-station 
platform. I would not, for anything, offend 
the reader's dignity, but I must think that this 
midwinter garden may be made at least as 
much lovelier than no garden as Alice's Cheshire 
cat was lovelier — with or without its grin — 
than the grin without the cat. 

Shall we summarize? Our gist is this: that 
those gardens of New Orleans are as they are, 
not by mere advantage of climate but for 
several other reasons. Their bounds of owner- 
ship and privacy are enclosed in hedges, tight 
or loose, or in vine-clad fences or walls. The 
lawn is regarded as a ruling feature of the home's 

192 




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MIDWINTER GARDENS 

visage, but not as its whole countenance — ■ 
one flat feature never yet made a lovely face. 
This lawn feature is beautified and magnified 
by keeping it open from shrub border to shrub 
border, saving it, above all things, from the 
gaudy barbarism of pattern-bedding; and by 
giving it swing and sweep of graceful con- 
tours. And lastly, all ground lines of the house 
are clothed with shrubberies whose deciduous 
growths are companioned with broad-leafed 
evergreens and varied conifers, in whatever 
proportions will secure the best midwinter 
effects without such abatement to those of 
summer as would diminish the total of the 
whole year's joy. 

These are things that can be done anywhere 
in our land, and wherever done with due re- 
gard to soil as well as to climate will give us 
gardens worthy to be named with those of 
New Orleans, if not, in some aspects and at 
particular times of the year, excelling them. 
As long as mistakes are made in the architec- 
ture of houses they will be made in the architec- 
ture of gardening, and New Orleans herself, by 

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

a little more care for the fundamentals of art, 
of all art, could easily surpass her present floral 
charm. Yet in her gardens there is one further 
point calling for approval and imitation: the 
very high trimming of the stems of lofty trees. 
Here many a reader will feel a start of resent- 
ment; but in the name of the exceptional 
beauty one may there see resulting from the 
practice let us allow the idea a moment's enter- 
tainment, put argument aside and consider a 
concrete instance whose description shall be 
our closing word. 

Across the street in which, that January, we 
sojourned (we were two), there was a piece of 
ground of an ordinary town square's length and 
somewhat less breadth. It had been a private 
garden. Its owner had given it to the city. 
Along its broad side, which our windows looked 
out upon, stood perfectly straight and upright 
across the sky to the south of them a row of 
magnolias (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high, 
with their boles, as smooth as the beach, 
trimmed bare for two-thirds of their stature. 
The really decorative marks of the trimming 

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MIDWINTER GARDENS 

had been so many years, so many decades, 
healed as to show that no harm had come of 
it or would come. The soaring, dark-green, glit- 
tering foliage stood out against the almost per- 
petually blue and white sky. Beyond them, a 
few yards within the place but not in a straight 
line, rose even higher a number of old cedars 
similarly treated and offering a pleasing con- 
trast to the magnolias by the feathery texture 
of their dense sprays and the very different cast 
of their lack-lustre green. Overtopping all, on 
the farther line of the grounds, southern line, 
several pecan-trees of nearly a hundred feet in 
height, leafless, with a multitude of broad- 
spreading boughs all high in air by natural 
habit, gave an effect strongly like that of winter 
elms, though much enlivened by the near com- 
pany of the evergreen masses of cedar and 
magnolia. These made the upper-air half of 
the garden, the other half being assembled be- 
low. For the lofty trim of the wintergreen- 
trees^ — the beauty of which may have been 
learned from the palms — allowed and invited 
another planting beneath them. Magnolias, 

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

when permitted to branch low, are, to under- 
growth, among the most inhospitable of trees, 
but in this garden, where the sunlight and the 
breezes passed abundantly under such high- 
lifted arms and among such clean, bare stems, a 
congregation of shrubs, undershrubs and plants 
of every stature and breadth, arose, flourished 
and flowered without stint. Yonder the wind- 
split, fathom-long leaves of the banana, bright- 
ening the background, arched upward, drooped 
again and faintly oscillated to the air's caress. 
Here bloomed and smelled the delicate magnolia 
fuscata, and here, redder with flowers than green 
with shining leaves, shone the camelha. Here 
spread the dark oleander, the pittosporum and 
the Chinese privet; and here were the camphor- 
tree and the slender sweet olive — we have 
named them all before and our steps should 
not take us over the same ground twice in one 
circuit; that would be bad gardening. But 
there they were, under those ordinarily so in- 
tolerant trees, prospering and singing praises 
with them, some in full blossom and perfume, 
some waiting their turn, like parts of a choir. 

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MIDWINTER GARDENS 

In the midst of all, where a broad path eddied 
quite round an irregular open space, and that 
tender quaintness of decay appeared which is 
the unfailing New Orleans touch, the space was 
filled with roses. This spot was lovely enough 
by day and not less so for being a haunt 
of toddling babes and their nurses; but at 
night — ! Regularly at evening there comes 
into the New Orleans air, from Heaven knows 
whither, not a mist, not a fog nor a dampness, 
but a soft, transparent, poetical dimness that 
in no wise shortens the range of vision — a 
counterpart of that condition which so many 
thousands of favored travellers in other longi- 
tudes know as the "Atlantic haze." One night 
— oh, oftener than that, but let us say one for 
the value of understatement — returning to our 
quarters some time before midnight, we stepped 
out upon the balcony to gaze across into that 
garden. The sky was clear, the neighborhood 
silent. A wind stirred, but the shrubberies 
stood motionless. The moon, nearly full, swung 
directly before us, pouring its gracious light 
through the tenuous cross-hatchings of the 

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN 

pecans, nestling it in the dense tops of the cedars 
and magnohas and sprinkling it to the ground 
among the lower growths and between their 
green-black shadows. When in a certain im- 
potence of rapture we cast about in our minds 
for an adequate comparison — where descrip- 
tion in words seemed impossible — the only- 
parallel we could find was the art of Corot and 
such masters from the lands where the wonder- 
ful pictorial value of trees trimmed high has 
been known for centuries and is still cherished. 
For without those trees so disciplined the ravish- 
ing picture of that garden would have been 
impossible. 

Of course our Northern gardens cannot smile 
like that in winter. But they need not perish, 
as tens of thousands of lawn-mower, pattern- 
bed, so-called gardens do. They should but 
hibernate, as snugly as the bear, the squirrel, 
the bee; and who that ever in full health of 
mind and body saw spring come back to a 
Northern garden of blossoming trees, shrubs 
and undershrubs has not rejoiced in a year of 
four clear-cut seasons? Or who that ever saw 

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MIDWINTER GARDENS 

mating birds, greening swards, starting vio- 
lets and all the early flowers loved of Shake- 
speare, Milton, Shelley, Bryant and Tennyson, 
has not felt that the resurrection of landscape 
and garden owes at least half its glory to the 
long trance of winter, and wished that dwellers 
in Creole lands might see New England's First 
of June? For what says the brave old song- 
couplet of New England's mothers ? That — 

"Spring would be but wintry weather 
If we had nothing else but spring." 

Every year, even in Massachusetts — even in 
Michigan — spring, summer, and autumn are 
sure to come overladen with their gifts and 
make us a good, long, merry visit. All the 
other enlightened and well-to-do nations of the 
world entertain them with the gardening art 
and its joys and so make fairer, richer and 
stronger than can be made indoors alone the 
individual soul, the family, the social, the civic, 
the national life. In this small matter we 
Americans are at the wrong end of the proces- 
sion. What shall we do about it ? 



199 



